Writers from China's diaspora
Like many of his peers in Asia, Singaporean Alvin Pang has dabbled in a variety of careers to support his first love of poetry.
As well as working in the civil service and teaching, he founded Singapore's Word Feast literary festival, been involved in the avant-garde Project Eyeball - a now defunct online and print newspaper - and is establishing an international poetry prize, hosted in Singapore.
During this time, Pang, 32, has published two volumes of poetry: Testing the Silence (1997), which the Straits Times listed as one of the top 10 books of 1997; and City of Rain (2003). He has co-edited poetry anthologies No Other City (2000) and Love Gathers All: A Philippines-Singapore Anthology of Love Poetry (2002); is country editor for Penguin's forthcoming Book of South East Asian Verse; and is a columnist for the Straits Times.
While visiting Hong Kong last month, Pang had hoped to reconnect with a city he hadn't seen since he was a teenager, but most of his focus was on his work-in-progress, a science-fiction novel that traces his family's history from the time his Chinese grandparents emigrated from the mainland to Singapore.
Despite being set in the future, the novel came about because, ever since he was a boy, Pang says he's been engrossed by his father's recollections of Singapore after the second world war and tales of how his grandfather cheated death at the hands of the Japanese occupiers. Pang says he decided he could have more fun bringing his family's biography to life if he moved away from a straightforward immigrant tale.