I Thought You Knew

Francis’s initial thought is that he must have dreamed the loud, bellowing cry. He hasn’t slept much in the past two days, yet his mind is strangely focused, plexiglass-clear. Other thoughts stick to him like magnets. Clear the tables. Check on Ma and Pa. Thank everyone on Facebook for showing up. This workman’s mentality keeps him going, the task of arranging his brother Marcus’s wake effortless yet so cold. Moving on autopilot deprives him of the release he imagined would come. Instead, he is subsumed by a feeling of encroachment, filling the deceptively open spaces in the hallways beneath the apartment block of his childhood home, above which Marcus and his parents had remained.

Pitched awnings bearing the funeral service operator’s logo double as painfully effective “Keep Out” signs, the privacy thickened by the ghostly lavender veil from half-burning joss sticks. The many oddly positioned pillars around the classic Singaporean void deck resemble giant sliding doors, forming a room within a room within a room. A square-shaped pavilion of white curtains, tastefully gathered into ruched hourglasses, has been formed into a cloister around Marcus’s coffin, also white. When it came time to select caskets, Francis had strictly vetoed other colours, not overtly telling his parents that the polished nut browns seemed too aged, suggesting Marcus had lived into some kind of antiquity. He hadn’t; he was only twenty-four, just a month past earning his teaching degree.

All week, Francis’s thoughts kept rewinding to the pivotal scene of identifying and claiming Marcus at the morgue. Each adrenaline-laced recall zeroed in on a specific body part because the initial impact had been too seismic. He had tried holding his breath, squinting his eyes to limit what he could see, had to see, of his younger brother who went before him, fourteen years his junior. But it backfired. His mind exaggerated and filled in the missing details, exploiting his love of museums and the famous painters whose works they housed. He could spend all day lost in paintings, marvelling at how directionless shades of colour could combine to create such beauty. He used to be content with that idea about life too—that, with all its multitudinous layers, it had to mean something in the end. Now he isn’t so sure.

These nightmarish flashes of Marcus’s corpse haunt him: facial features sagging and sliding off like dried wax, a nod to Dalí; rheumy blood, saturated in a bottomless Rothko, leaking from one ear, while haphazard Pollock sprays brand a bloated arm with a protruding bone. He now understands the urban legend of police placing handcuffs on those who die by suicide. Such violence, especially to oneself, feels criminal.

As Francis leaves the table where he has been sitting, he hears one of the aunties whisper in Hokkien, “You know why it’s a closed casket, right?,” though one can never truly whisper in dialect. The words easily pierce through the walls he has tried to build around him, tipping his slender frame off-centre as he slouches his way towards the noise.

This disorientating imbalance is further bolstered by tradition, elders forbidden from participating in the funeral rites of younger relatives. However, not everyone in the family abides by this archaic rule. Older relatives crawl out of hibernation in plain white T-shirts that turn a muddy grey beneath their sour faces. Most of them, ex-labourers now in retirement, have traded the use of their knotted limbs for mouths that complain about their immutable lives and gossip about the lives of others. Unfazed by the impermanence of life, they act as if their presence alone is enough. Sometimes, just being there isn’t enough.

“I’m going to go check on Auntie Teng,” Francis assures relatives whilst manoeuvring from table to table, his hand caressing the hardy plastic backs of their chairs, the closest he’s ever been, or will be, to touching the people.

“Aiyo, look at her. How can she be wearing black? No face leh,” he hears one auntie say as he passes her.

“Hannor,” another agrees.

The dark stump of old Auntie Teng rocks by the altar that guards Marcus’s body. The throttling cry she has been letting out shows no perceptible break. The sound is distorted and unnatural, seemingly impossible for her stout figure, her throat bound by coils of juicy black pearls that glitter under her bottle-dyed hair. The surrounding columns of noticeably fake chrysanthemums help break the monotony, too, canary yellows seeping, fleeing this sleepy town in search of the sun’s resinous reminder of life.

Some people call Admiralty, located at the northernmost tip of Singapore, its loneliest stretch of housing districts, a uniform landscape of bruised, flat-roofed buildings, an obsidian barrier—where it isn’t safe for pretty schoolgirls to wear headphones out at night, where weeds thrive but still grow in neat rows, slyly masking their wildness, where an entire multi-complex has been built especially for the exponentially multiplying elderly, its alliance with death increasingly prominent.

Francis has only witnessed the spectacle of death once before, at his Nai Nai’s funeral almost a decade ago. They were made to walk around her coffin in curling panther strides while a priest draped in rust-coloured fabric chanted feverishly, freakishly, his voice raking over the stunned silence, scaring even the most gregarious of ghosts. Francis had searched for the obscured upside, like the one reflected in the glass roof of the coffin and its bevelled edges, flickering paisleys of yin and yang warring in the changing light. Strangely, looking at Nai Nai’s mummified corpse up close didn’t frighten him. Her mouth appeared yanked open, a pearl lodged between her lips’ shadowy rim, beatifying what would otherwise be a grotesque sight. But all he saw was a teetering between a yawn and an utterance of gratitude; in fact, she was smiling.

He was trying to find some sense of peace in Marcus’s death too, but the nights were too dark, answers hidden in shadow. He wondered if the act of dying had that same quiet release, free from pain. What was the beautiful thing he missed, having not been there that early Monday morning as Marcus leapt from the rooftop of an apartment block a five-minute walk away?

* * *

Auntie Teng’s wails, like a child throwing a fit, stop almost immediately as soon as Francis taps her on the shoulder. “So young. You cannot judge a person by his hairstyle,” she announces with a musical lilt.

“You mean ‘judge a book by its cover,’ Auntie?” Francis asks, trying not to sound condescending.

“Same la, don’t correct me.”

Auntie Teng is the family spinster no one wants to be around, not even at Chinese New Year gatherings. Francis and Marcus were taught to tolerate her wickedness, though, because she always gives the biggest ang baos. “Never marry a white girl, boy,” she told him when he turned eighteen. “They’re too independent and you’ll never find anyone more beautiful. Better to marry someone slightly uglier than you.”

He has been expecting more of her tongue lashings during the wake. Surely, she has something to say about Marcus’s unbecoming choice to die and his method. Yet she remains pensive, almost childlike in her attentiveness. In some way, she has remained a child, exiled from the married adults of the family, her voice the only primitive tool she knows how to use to get attention. Does she recognise this same loneliness in Marcus, staying silent in solidarity?

Her eyes float to the easel displaying a blurry, blown-up photograph of Marcus, granulated pixels jutting out of the frame, ageing him with a rash of simulated pockmarks. They have had to settle for a low-quality photo taken with an old iPhone, but it is the one with his nicest smile, candidly caught in mid-turn, the warmth of it spilling up into his eyes. Francis narrows in on them, trying to explicate their colour. Yes, they are brown, but what particular shade of brown? In Francis’s limited Pantone Rolodex, none of them feels like a “Marcus” brown.

“Have you cried yet, boy?” Auntie Teng asks, waving her chopstick of an arm, sheathed beneath her velvet double-breasted jacket with gold appliqué. Chinese medicine oil, doubling as her perfume, releases an odour of camphor into the air. Regarding her creased, tallowy skin, Francis shamefully wonders why she isn’t the one who’s dead.

His saliva collects into a knot. “No, Auntie. I don’t think I can,” he replies.

“But you must cry so that he can hear you!” she says admonishingly.

Superstition is the religion his family is born into, practised casually but wielded whenever most convenient. Tonight, he begins to see that these little rituals, though intended to ward off bad luck, are ludicrous. They no longer hold currency among the living, just like the hell money the family has so judiciously bought for the wake, along with the intricate paper effigies of bungalows, Apple gadgets, and a fleet of chromed Mercedes-Benzes, all burned for Marcus to use in the afterlife. These gestures bring people a manufactured peace for having fulfilled their obligations.

Francis wishes grief were that easy; he has a much larger debt to pay, anchored by an overwhelming heaviness. Though invisible, the weight is there, the scene of that fateful morning a traceable phantom, like casting a reflection through layers of cellophane. His mind shapes the scene into one of those eerie landscapes he has seen in a European museum: The sky would still have been dark then, the accompanying cries of crickets and copulating stray cats interrupted by an announcing thud, though no one would awaken … He thinks to himself how everything can be so loud and quiet all at the same time.

“Auntie Teng, you’re wearing black. Isn’t that wrong, too?”

“Nonsense, nuisance! You think the dead care what you wear? I’m not even supposed to be here, you know! But I still show up. It’s what you do that matters. And you dare talk back?”

She slaps the back of her wrist against his arm, her arsenal of expensive rings stinging his skin. Her frown, now deeper, cuts fault lines around her face. How can she access her emotions with a snap of a finger, to cry so fervently for someone she only saw once a year? Francis convinces himself his grief is so much more than hers, taut as a stretched rubber band, launching, scattering his invisible tears across the void deck and into the universe, too infinite to measure. 

* * *

Everyone has left, leaving Francis alone with Marcus. He stands imperturbable in the centre of the void deck facing the altar, where Auntie Teng had been crying. A rush of vertigo surges through him, as though the laws of gravity have swapped planes, suspending him in mid-air, his gaze drawn to the top of the shrinking coffin. 

The polyptych of memories with Marcus assembles, flashing by too quickly for Francis to fully grasp or study. Each panel feels small and inconsequential, bleeding into the next until they merge into an abridged whole, like a mountain range of wasted time. Almost a generation apart, the brothers had spent their lives leapfrogging over one another, never given the chance to collide.

“Hey, Boot,” calls a voice from behind—his girlfriend, Rina. Two years ago, on a hot August afternoon, she had had all four wisdom teeth removed and Francis had driven her home. High on anaesthesia, she’d decided to tell Francis she loved him for the first time. With cotton wads stuffed in her mouth and drool trickling down her chin, she struggled to form the words, turning her heartfelt “I love you, boo” into a garbled “Eye-rough-few, boot,” setting up the punchline for herself. The nickname has stuck.

“Hey, Shoe,” he replies softly, volleying their inside joke.

Rina tries to bury her smile under her gamine face, failing adorably. Being with her feels like a piece of Francis has been peeled away, a budding in his heart that cranes hungrily towards her champagne-hued warmth. He is a child when it comes to love. The Hos raised their sons the way they themselves were raised—always focused on providing, with the automatic retort to work hard in school and follow orders, threatening a rattan cane if anyone strayed. Francis followed suit, scolding and nagging Marcus for every perceived misstep, introducing adult pain and humiliation even before his parents could. This was his unorthodox form of protection, a radical act of love that translated poorly; if only their ancestors had placed the same emphasis on love as they did on superstitions and death rituals.

Rina places a wrapped Filet-O-Fish in his hand, careful not to squish it, her touch morphing into a minute grip.

“Thanks,” Francis tells her, unwrapping the waxen paper and biting off a morsel. 

“I know it’s stupid, but how are you holding up?”

After a few metered breaths, the initial pull Francis feels becomes an almost weightless addition, like a new wrinkle sprouting on the skin, following the soft undulating of his teeth against wet bread, slowing everything to a point where he can hear the straggling pulse in his temples. The space he is left in has the texture of webbed linen, the feeling of watching a loose thread clinging to a shirt’s sleeve waiting to be pulled. On the other side is, he hopes, an exaltation that will absolve him from the guilt he’s been avoiding. Or will he be trapped in more of the same strange, viscous stasis?

“Everything feels slowed down,” Francis says in a single continuous breath.

“On my dad’s side, they believe life and death are the same, separated only by a thin line,” says Rina, who is half-Japanese. “It’s called shoji, the paper material used to make window screens like in those sushi restaurants. You’re in the middle of crossing the shoji now; that’s why you feel … stuck.”

The line had temporarily revealed itself that Monday afternoon when Francis got the call. Having gone back to check on his parents after identifying the body, he found that his mother had locked herself in the master bedroom and his father was in the kitchen spooning blooms of recently fried hae bee hiam from the charred wok, saying nothing. The acrid fumes rising off the chilis had unveiled a prickling discomfort, the way static startled your fingertips when brushing them against a lit television screen, the same feeling Francis had seeing Marcus’s face at the morgue just hours earlier. His brother’s mouth had retained its flat, sewn position, not open and receiving like Nai Nai’s when she died, which had ingrained a hypothesis into Francis that his brother was not at peace.

He had slipped into Marcus’s bedroom looking for breadcrumbs: a note, perhaps, some clue. A painting of an Appalachian woman kneeling beside a deer under falling snow, purchased by their parents on their honeymoon in Vancouver, covered one section of moss-coloured wall. Below it sat the same super-single bed Francis had once slept in, fitted with the same Transformers sheets going to mesh. These clashing hand-me-downs had given the room a numbing, impersonal haze. Balled-up clothes in the closet looked babyish and asleep like cocoons. The objects on the study desk—textbooks and files of study notes shelved in militant lines, a Casio watch with its clasp fixed closed, a scale model of a rocket ship—seemed to have lost their resolve without their owner. The scene was an elucidation, revealing the true, unyielding power Marcus’s life had on the world around him. It was funny, Francis thought, how the value of something could be appreciated only in its absence.

Francis feels Rina’s hand glide up his forearm, then slowly trail back down to his wrist, as if unspooling a thread. He lets out a cry that sounds like an awkwardly timed giggle.

“Even though you’re younger than me, you always seem so level-headed,” he says. “I read somewhere that Japanese people tend to sweat less. Genetics. Are you all just calmer in general too? More attuned to the universe?”

“Hai, Francis-san,” Rina replies coyly. “I’ll tell you something else I know. You’re not getting enough sleep. I thought you could pay someone to watch over the coffin. Why don’t you do that?”

“I don’t want some stranger doing what I should be doing,” he snaps.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. What I’m saying is … you need to stop blaming yourself.”

Her honesty repels him. He will never know the reasons behind Marcus’s death, forever a question mark, his suicide adding an exclamation point behind it. But the thing about truth is that, even when it’s lost to us, something in us keeps searching.

* * *

A vertical shaft of light forms a slim door outside Marcus’s bedroom, a glowing refuge from the dark. The lit pillar doesn’t illuminate much of the house but, rather, colours it in swaths of varying greys that expose its futility—peeling laminate, bulbous wicker furniture smelling of wet sand, olive grout.

For a flinching moment, Francis thinks Marcus has come home. Slats of shadows in front of him begin to stir and blink. Through the crack of the door, Francis watches his father pick himself up from Marcus’s bed. He has no shirt on, only a pair of worn boxer shorts, skin stippled like grained leather from having been out in the sun too much. The sight is a far cry from the father Francis once knew, the man who applied his warrant officer training to parenting. The hard veneer of authority has chipped away, leaving him exposed in a way Francis hasn’t seen before. Just human.

“You need something?” the old man asks, his curled hand grazing the caved niche below his eye.

“No, Pa. I only came up to use the toilet.”

“I saw him that morning,” his father says suddenly. “I woke up earlier than usual and he was about to leave the house. He told me he was going for a run. But he had slippers on. Slippers.”

His father hangs his head down to the broad fold of his chest. His cheeks turn a bright medicinal pink, the colour of shame. Instinctively, Francis wants to reach out and take hold of his father’s shoulder, sweat on the rounded joint glistening under the ceiling lamp, an inviting sheen. But quickly he realises that his left hand, his dominant, is still clutching the Filet-O-Fish, now pressed into mulch, the oily wrapper crinkling like a dried leaf. He considers using his right hand, but the moment has passed, postmarked by his father waving him away.

“Try to get some sleep, Pa,” Francis says, backing into the hallway without turning around. Only then does he notice the master bedroom at the end of the hall, its lights still on. The faint sound of movement inside confirms his mother’s presence. A soft warmth pools under the sill, too weak to reach the shadow cast by Marcus’s half-open bedroom door.

Each of them suffers silently in separate rooms, in their separate lives, as they always have.

* * *

Jeremy Thomson enters the void deck in quick, hurried steps, the wedged heels of his branded Oxfords attacking the cement floor in clean bursts. With little time to react, Francis is engulfed by the enormity of his old friend’s embrace. Though they haven’t seen each other in almost fifteen years, Francis recognises him instantly: his candy-pink skin, slender nose with a pompous upturn, and Arctic blue eyes constantly mistaken for contacts distinguish him from other locals.

“Francis, I came as soon as I could. I would have come earlier but I had to finish my rounds at the hospital,” Jeremy says, frantically hopping over the spaces between his words.

“No worries. Thanks for coming.”

“I thought you would have held the wake at the new Woodlands Memorial. It’s so close! They arrange everything for you there, plus a dedicated floor for every religion. Real classy place.”

“Noted for the next time someone I know goes.”

“Ha, funny. Keeping a sense of humour is healthy during a time like this.”

A sick, dispossessed feeling grips Francis. Their parents are friends from church. He and Jeremy have known each other since they were cupid-faced altar boys dressed in bell-shaped gowns. Even then, Francis harboured unfair thoughts without understanding why. Now, watching Jeremy’s lithe frame draped like a thin cardigan meant for show, not warmth, that churning resentment has finally found its words.

The entire Thomson family is the same way, exuding privilege not just in a material sense, its shimmering effect proudly on display at a Christmas dinner the Hos were invited to one year. They served turkey, chicken empanadas shaped like fluffy hotel pillows, mashed potatoes with an indulgent amount of butter, cherry tomatoes stuffed with sweet prunes. The Thomson children could talk to their parents about current events and pop culture, telling jokes that drew rapturous laughter. One of them even leapt onto his chair on a dare. If the Thomsons’ love looked like a page out of an American holiday catalogue, then the Hos’ was wrapped in plain newspaper.

Now, a slow, delicate dance begins as Francis and Jeremy settle by one of the tables, catching up on life. They begin by asking the usual boring questions to test the waters: What have you been up to lately? Married yet? Got your BTO already? Francis himself answers willingly, blithely grateful for the distraction. They progress to reminiscing about the times they used to get together after church service on Sundays, but more so Jeremy, recounting every little detail. Francis nods along mechanically, pretending he remembers.

In that instant, he realises his measured bouts of silence have likely given the impression he is open, willing even, for a deeper conversation.

“You know, there’s a saying, ‘You never really know a person until they’re dead,’” Jeremy says, half-chuckling, half-sighing. “I don’t know why that just came to me.”

“I didn’t even know my Nai Nai’s actual name until her funeral, when I saw it on her ancestral tablet,” Francis replies.

He tries to recall Nai Nai’s name but cannot, the words in his throat freezing into stone. Forgetting her name feels like a betrayal, as though in his mind he’s already lost her. And now, a regression to small talk feels like it will turn Marcus into an afterthought. The only way is forward; moving back means losing more than he can bear.

“So, Jeremy, you work in a hospital. How do you cope with all this? Death, I mean.”

“You sort of become desensitised to it after seeing dead bodies practically every other day in my line of work. You know what’s the worst? It’s when people want to die but realise they’ve failed. Just last week, I saw a kid in Ortho—barely twelve. She jumped from the tenth storey but survived. I didn’t know what to say, so I just told her the cold, hard facts: she’s probably paralysed for life.”

The callousness in his tone, laced with a finely milled arrogance, perturbs Francis. He knows the Thomsons would similarly regard the anomaly of suicides as a distant, cosmic probability. He feels the devil slither in, like the way too much alcohol can twist the truth, turning friends into foes. Tragedy wields that same selfish power, making him want everyone else to feel just as bad.

“What would you do if it were Marcus?” Francis asks.

“I’m sorry?”

“If Marcus had survived after he jumped and was paralysed after. What would you have told him? That he was better off dead?”

Jeremy takes a measured breath, a pause more calculated than casual, before slowly baring the straight ivories of his teeth.

“To be honest, I would have told him that I was sorry I didn’t reach out sooner,” he says in a way one does when receiving unexpected but good news. “But I’m glad I did.”

Francis swallows hard. He observes Jeremy assuming a calming poise after having proved his point.

“You guys met? Since when?”

“Oh, right. We started talking on Instagram a few months back. I was so proud to see him doing well, even directing his first play.” Ruddy banners streak Francis’s cheeks. He sees that Jeremy notices, blood flow professional that he is. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew.”

Logic tells Francis the phrase merely refers to the rebuilt relationship Jeremy and Marcus shared. But the simplicity and vagueness of its content, coupled with the aloofness of its delivery, have unlocked a deeper, more unsettling truth: Marcus has remained largely a mystery to him. He hadn’t even known that Marcus liked theatre, let alone had been trying to go pro. It feels like another death in itself, mourning the brother he never bothered to get close to—no inside jokes, not even knowing his favourite colour.

After a long silence, Francis stands up. “Follow me,” he says.

With newfound fervour, he pulls Jeremy along as they step out of the void deck and onto the pebbled concrete path ahead.

Outside, the crescent moon is on the brink of extinction, shaved down cleanly. Tomorrow, a new moon will be waiting to smile again, marking the end of the grieving process. The Hos will bring Marcus’s body to Mandai for cremation, swiftly transferring his ashes to a temple on an inconspicuous street that holds their ancestral altar. They will return to their mundane routines, all before the weekend is over. What about the next day? And the next days after that? 

Francis and Jeremy amble past the common playground, where the vinyl wrappings on the metal play structures shred away in crisscrossed peels, the multi-purpose court rendered lame by its torn net. The violet, bell-shaped heads of wilting morning glories bow with respectful decay, each in its own state of mourning. The world around Francis heals by replacing. 

The flaws around the estate can be patched up easily. The flowers will rejuvenate. Marcus’s blood on the concrete will eventually be washed away, blending into the blackish grime that has settled underneath.

The men come to a sudden stop on a grassy rise overlooking the other half of the apartment complex: tall, rectangular public housing blocks grouped in tight formations. To reach it, one must descend a precarious set of tiered steps and cross a wooden bridge. A canal, dressed as a fancy waterfront feature, slices through the Tetris-like landscape. The water is a reptilian green which merges with the intense night. The darkness feels like a disguise. The walls surrounding Francis, the ones he has thought were of his own making, have always been there, ancient, unyielding. He thinks of how survival demands that we tear down these defences, softening and dissolving into something more fluid—a wave of comfort that pushes against the storms of life. And in this moment, all Francis wants is to tear it all down: the walls, the pretences, everything that stood between him and Marcus.

“God, it’s so balmy out here,” Jeremy says, letting out a simmering sigh.

“Balmy. Why do you have to say it like that? You’re from Singapore. Fucking say ‘humid’ like the rest of us.”

“Whoa. Slow down, brother. Are you feeling all right?”

Francis blurts, “We’re not close like that, okay? You can’t just come barging in here with your fancy words and your perfect life. So what if you got to reconnect? Marcus was my brother, not yours. You can’t have him.”

Jeremy stares at him blankly, temples sliding back, eyes and brows widening like a parachute pulled open. For the first time, his freshly groomed face finally lets up, his ice-perfect features cracking to form snowflake wrinkles all around. “I’m sorry —” he begins.

“You see that?” Francis interjects, thrusting his finger into the air. He points across the canal, to the block at the far end where Marcus had jumped. The building seems to float in mid-air, candle-like in its form, bleached against the biting indigo sky.

A deep knowing starts to settle, inexplicable, the way a radio mysteriously plays a song just as you think of it. 

“That’s where he chose to die,” Francis continues, shoulders heaving. “Do you know why he walked all the way to that block, instead of climbing to the roof of our own?”

“I don’t want to hear any more,” Jeremy whispers.

“It’s because he didn’t want any of us to find him.”

A swirl of pride and belated happiness temporarily inflates Francis’s heart. He desperately wants to believe everything he has just said. He pushes past the somnambulant Jeremy, breaking into a limping run toward the apartment block, his legs carrying him through the canal’s marbled water brimming with impatient ripples. An outmoded elevator churns piteously as it lifts him to the top floor.

Everything with Marcus had been left unsaid … How did they ever let it come to this, where the words “love” and “suicide” had the same shrinking effect, their tongues held silent by clenched jaws? They had all mistaken surviving for living, but for Marcus and Francis, their relationship had become another shoji screen, suspended between two worlds.

Francis steadies himself against the parapet, overlooking the view Marcus chose. Blue-black splotches from the prickly tops of Angsana trees shiver close to the wall beside him. Further back, the lights from container ships skip and flounder dreamily on the Johor Strait, suddenly stopping mid-frame, free-falling into pitch black. A random image of the model rocket from Marcus’s room launches into Francis’s private sky. He imagines it climbing steadily, following a straight, planned path. In some morbid way, it comforts him to think that the feeling of falling and flying might be the same—that instead of Marcus’s body being left on cold cement, it had landed safely on another planet. He tries to keep the rocket ship on its spectral route, with imaginary plumes of soot and flames tearing through the blank, mercurial sky. But his heart pulls him back, dragging him into the overwhelming emptiness harboured by the night.

With a slow, trembling breath, Francis begins to cry uncontrollably.

KEVIN NICHOLAS WONG

Kevin Nicholas Wong is a creative producer based in Singapore, with an MA in Creative Writing from LASALLE College of the Arts. His short stories have appeared in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and anthologies such as The Best Asian Short Stories 2022 and Best New Singaporean Short Stories.