Feature Stories

Many, many moons ago, when I was a fresh-faced graduate with a chunk of student debt to pay off, I worked for a while in a nursing home. It was a rather grand, if somewhat faded country home that...

Let’s pretend I was 18 when I got my first tattoo. That’s still a considerable whack of years to have been inked.  The word tattoo means literally “a puncture, or mark made on the skin”, first noted in Captain Cook’s...

I must confess from the get go that I don't have any tattoos. I flirted with the idea of getting song lyrics in my teenage years; I would have gone for somewhere understated, like a tricep or inner thigh....

As Miranda's eyes fixated on the blinking red lights of the Level 5 Vernacular Lock, a surge of adrenaline coursed through her veins. The cold, unyielding metal of a gun pressed against the back of her scalp. Glancing at the...

Showing off one’s self in the best possible light is a natural human attribute. But, just as with everything else, in China that concept is taken to new levels. Political correctness be damned; body pride is the way to...

Chinese weddings are no meagre affair. Copious amounts of food, baijiu, the colour red filled the wedding venue; lest we forget the guests themselves. With this “姐” (“jie”; sister) and that “哥” (“ge”; brother) all staring at the grinning...

A kettle sits in my front garden, inside a wedge of polystyrene in a cardboard box. I know for sure it is a kettle, because I justbought a new one. On Taobao.  The piercing whistle of the old one has...

Stephanie read the address out loud, hoping that this time, it would ring a bell. Sadly, just like every time before now, she came up blank. In her almost fifteen years of being a delivery person, she had never...