ABOUT ME
THE SHORT VERSION
I was born in Singapore, an island sitting on an equatorial belt known as The Doldrums. I was kept intact by books, music, movies, air-conditioning and “The Exploding Cat,” a collage-heavy zine I created with my friends. As a teenager, I wrote rock music reviews and the horoscopes page for a popular magazine. When the opportunity presented itself, I ran off to England to read Film Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury, where I studied film noir, melodrama and the phantasmagoric films of David Cronenberg.
Upon graduation, I was hired by the Straits Times, Singapore’s largest English-language daily, becoming its film critic at 21. During this period, I traveled widely, sat on film festival juries, made short films, gave talks and directed a play, culminating in my winning a major grant from the National Arts Council of Singapore.
In 1997, I headed off to Columbia University, where I wound up with an MFA in Film. My zombie romance screenplay “Voodoo Kiss” (co-written with my husband John Powers) was optioned by producer Edward R. Pressman (American Psycho, Badlands) and my short films “Moveable Feast” and “Gourmet Baby” have played at MoMA, the New York Film Festival, the Los Angeles Film Festival and about eighty other film festivals worldwide. They have also been broadcast in Europe, Australia and the US. “Gourmet Baby” is in the permanent collection of the Slow Food film festival in Bra, Italy and collected in the anthology DVD, Singapore Shorts Vol. II.
In recent years, my interests have grown literary. I reviewed books for the LA Weekly, whose 2007 Literary Supplement also published my fiction piece “Thwack!”. My fiction has also appeared in Black Clock, the literary journal edited by the novelist Steve Erickson and published by CalArts.
I live in Pasadena, Calif., and I’m currently at work on my debut novel, THE BLACK ISLE, which will be published by Grand Central.
