About

I write stories about my childhood, adolescence and beyond. I contemplate growing up Yellow in a world of Black and White during South Africa’s apartheid era. And I muse about what-ifs, things I should have said or done, and places my imagination takes me. This includes poems, memoirs, memoir-ish fiction, short stories, essays, and even a novel.

I am a third generation Chinese South African whose peripatetic journey has taken me to Toronto, Chicago, Irvine, New York, Vancouver WA, Portland OR, and back to Southern California. 

I was the President of the Board of Directors of The Newtown Literary Alliance in New York, and a mentor at The Queens Council on the Arts. My writing has appeared in Gravel, The Celestal Review, Embark Literary Magazine, The Newtown Literary Journal, and the online poetry project Queensbound. My story “The Cruelty of Children” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

I have read at LineBreak, Queens Writers Resist, First Tuesdays, Lewis Latimer House, and other venues in New York, as well as at Literary Arts in Portland

If there’s a poem or story that speaks to you, please leave a comment under the poem/story or please send me a note and share your thoughts.

For essays, reviews, opinion pieces and travelogues, please visit my blog Seniledelinquent or for older content on Tumblr, Mal and Di’s Excellent Adventures.

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Poetry

“I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The ‘unsayable’ thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.” – Rebecca Lindenberg

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Memoirs

“I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.”

“I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.”
― Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir

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Short Fiction

“A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.”
― Lorrie Moore

“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.”
― Neil Gaiman

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