About Bangkok Diaries

In 2008, I was going to move to Bangkok. I flew from Shanghai to Xiamen, but instead of going onwards to Bangkok as I’d planned, I bought a ticket and traveled right back to Shanghai that same day. I ended up living in Shanghai for fifteen years.

In 2023, I traveled via Bangkok to Norwich in England where I planned to be for a few years. At the end of the three-day layover in Bangkok, I thought, ‘I’d love to come back and live here sometime.’

A year later, in 2024, I moved to Bangkok.

These are my Bangkok Diaries – recordings of aimless time of a flâneur, an exile, a member of the Chinese diaspora of the 21st Century.

Who am I?

I am a writer and translator. I am the 2023/2024 recipient of the David T.K. Wong Creative Writing Fellowship, awarded annually by the University of East Anglia to a fiction writer working on a novel in English about East Asia and Southeast Asia.

I am a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, a long-term Shanghai resident, ex-gallerist, and a writer who has written about contemporary art, design, and queer cultures in China. My writing has appeared in publications including the Washington Post, Architectural Digest, the Art Newspaper, the World from PRX, Literary Shanghai, W Magazine, Time Out Shanghai, OutThere Magazine, City Weekend and Numéro, among others. I also work in the audio form as a script editor and voice actor for a storytelling podcast. I am interested in exploring ideas such as memory, nostalgia, displacement, and imagined reality. I am currently working on a first novel, set in contemporary Shanghai.