To win Thailand’s biggest transsexual beauty pageant, you need a number of near-impossible things on your side. It helps if you’re tall, although big hands and feet are a minus. You’ll be told you need to look “natural”, even though organisers and judges have been known to pull contestants aside, and encourage them to undertake more cosmetic surgery. Above all, the judges will want you to look like a “real girl”, even though the competition’s premise is that you were originally born with male sex organs. “The whole idea,” one …

I lived in Iruma in Japan, just a forty-five minute express train ride through concrete and hills dotted with statues of former trees shaded with white snow from Tokyo, a place they still call the biggest city in the world. In my view, it is most certainly the biggest city in the world since the city began in my town, of course they don’t say it does but there is not a break in civilisation along the Seibu-Ikebukuro line. Aerials look like winter branches. Shiseido is a cliff face. Ebisu …

Hey there Hello Kitty lovers, how are you going?  I hope you’re coping well.  I know how difficult it is but you’re doing a great job trying to suppress your love for this adorable kitten. Don’t worry now, your suffering will soon be put to an end.   The withdrawals will become more and more infrequent. Your pain and misery will be put to an end.  No longer will you have to struggle with the urge to google “Hello Kitty”, visit the Sanrio website or make a trip to Chinatown to …

The installation Pho Dog provoked a reaction from the Vietnamese Community Association in Western Australia.

Highlights from the Asian/Australian Values: New Directions in Australian Literature Workshop
I attended this workshop along with Tom Cho courtesy of Wenche Ommundsen and Alison Broinowski who brought together writers, publishers and academics to discuss Asian/Australian Values. Much was quoted from the current Griffith Review issue “In the Neighbourhood”, which featured articles discussing translation and “contamination” as a way of literary cross-pollination.