I continued to spend the long years since childhood cultivating solitude, pursuing silence to its ever-receding horizon, a pursuit that demanded a particular quality of attention, a self-forgetfulness on my part that would enable me to bring to bear the most painstaking, the most careful consideration to the other, to treat the other as the […]

No, I’d open a refuge for mothers. A retreat. Concrete 1970s brutalism, an anti-domestic architecture without flounces. Something low with big windows and wide corridors, carpets to deaden sound. There will be five or six rooms off the corridor, each with a wall of glass and sliding doors looking on to a cold, grey beach. […]

The day was bright again, as if England had forgotten how to rain. The bracken is always the first to turn, bronze already coming through at midsummer, but it was still a steadfast deep green. It seemed as if all the flowers were out at once, purple and yellow vetch, foxgloves, of course the heather […]

When they’d thrown their plastic cups away and pushed politely past the others back to their seats, the pianist returned to her bench and stared at the keys reflected there in the high ebony gloss with what seemed a superhuman concentration. Then she flung up her wrists, flared her nostrils, and the Hammerklavier was sprung […]

I remember the stories my mother used to tell me, stories that had been handed down by her own grandmother’s grandmother, who had married a merchant and travelled from the villages outside of Battambang. My mother once told me that when a child is born, threads are tied around the infant’s wrists to bind her […]

”I assumed,” Ai-ming told me, ”that when Big Mother’s stories finished, life would continue and I would go back to being myself. But it wasn’t true. The stories got longer and longer, and I got smaller and smaller. When I told my grandmother this, she laughed her head off. She said, ’But that’s how the […]