Tag:friends

Spicy Auntie has sat in enough roadside cafés during her work trips across Asia to know that the dim light is never just about electricity. It is about negotiation. About discretion. About survival. When we talk about warung remang-remang or kopi pangku, the conversation too often slips into easy moral drama: fallen women, corrupt men, decaying values. I’m not interested in that script. I’m interested in power. In money. In who has choices and who is improvising under pressure. East Java’s roads do not create desire — they channel it....

Oh, Hong Kong. A city where you can order Michelin-starred dim sum at 2am, close a seven-figure deal before lunch, and still somehow fail to schedule a second date. I read about the matchmaking boom and I both smile and sigh. Of course it’s happening. Of course people are paying professionals to find them love. In a place where time is money and money is survival, romance becomes another investment portfolio. Diversify your assets: stocks, property, and—why not—a curated spouse. And yet, beneath the irony, I feel something tender. Because...

I’m not going to soften this with euphemisms. What the Japanese military regime did to women across occupied Asia during the Second World War was a crime against humanity. Not a “tragic by-product” of war. Not a cultural misunderstanding. Not the excesses of a few bad soldiers. It was organized, bureaucratic, systematic sexual enslavement. And calling it by its proper name matters, because anything less lets power off the hook. But here’s the part that makes people uncomfortable: this was not an isolated horror, unique to Imperial Japan, sealed off...

I’ve met some of these women over the years in the North. Not always in formal interviews, not with notebooks open and recorders on. Sometimes it was over tea that had gone cold, sometimes sitting on a cement step while children hovered nearby, listening without being invited. They didn’t introduce themselves as “LTTE widows.” They introduced themselves as mothers, daughters, caretakers, survivors. The label came later, usually whispered, usually with a pause. What struck me most was not anger. It was fatigue. A bone-deep tiredness that comes from living too...

I’ve spent enough time in courtrooms, NGO workshops, and whispered late-night conversations with women across South Asia to recognise a familiar ghost. He usually wears a robe, carries a law book, and insists—very calmly—that he is only protecting morality. Spoiler: he’s British, dead, and still running the show. What makes me grind my teeth is not just that colonial sex laws were cruel. It’s that they were intimate. They crawled straight into bedrooms, wombs, and kitchens. They decided which kinds of love were respectable, which marriages were suspicious, and which...