malaysia

The sun was beginning to set and the water was sparkling in the low light as the onshore breeze that had built up through the heat of the day rippled across the reflective surface, breaking it into a million diamonds of yellow-white light.

Magic ran in the family. Even her mother's second cousin, who was adopted, did small spells on the side. She sold these from a stall in Kota Bharu. Her main wares were various types of fruit fried in batter, but if you bought five pisang or cempedak goreng, she threw in a jampi for free.

Whether I'm a good wife doesn't have anything to do with what he was like.

It seemed as if the mountains, wave after wave of them, were like the sea, going outward forever into distance, till, far away, they became engulfed in clouds, and joined__ountain and sky in one. Standing there on top, facing the enormity of the world, I thought of myself as a man. How boundlessly small we are_

During the Japanese invasion, bombs had fallen from the sky and people could run for cover. Now, they exploded in the middle of the road, or in the fields while people were playing soccer.

Love was like swallowing a cili padi whole.

I brought seaweed snacks from home,' chimed in another kid. "Seaweed got iron, right?"'I don't think the teachers meant that kind of iron,' said Hui Ann.

But a woman should not marry where there is no respect. Respect is the most important thing.

The tabloids wanted to know whether the dragon was receiving benefits. The gossip magazines claimed to have found a woman who was bearing the dragon's baby. The fashion magazines did spreads on draconian style. This apparently consisted of gaunt models with sunken eyes, swathed in clouds of chiffon and arranged in awkwardly erotic positions on piles of gold coins.

He would gaze at her with intrigued longan seed eyes.

The first time she saw the boy across the classroom, Ah Lee knew she was in love because she tasted durian on her tongue.

I can speak four dialects, but none of them is fairy language.

I thought: if I die, I hope I get reincarnated into a mosquito so I can bite that fucker kau-kau.

Other dragons are bastards. I moved out of my mother's cave after my mother tried to rip my guts out.Granted, I had tried to steal her Tiara of Clairvoyance.

I am writing this on a computer that I can__ imagine living without. This is an alarming thought, the extent to which I have organised my life around a metal box full of wires (and, via the Internet, to many other metal boxes full of wires). Someone told me most of the Internet is stored in a warehouse somewhere in North Carolina. I don__ know enough about technology to gauge if this is true, but it made me realise how little I actually understand about the world I inhabit. The world of Dr Wong__ childhood was significantly smaller than mine, but he understood every square inch of it.

It is a strange thing, looking at the sea. When it is calm, or with only gentle ripples, it gives an impression of being soft and kind. But often, on such a calm, the wind suddenly blows, thrusting the water back into angry waves. At such times, in a certain sense, one feels sorry for the sea. Never of itself offensive to others, it is all too often attacked by wind and rain, the rain falling densely upon it, shaming the beauty of its calm face with a million bouncing bubbles. Were the wind to stop blowing, the ocean, surely, would never afflict the land with any calamity, nor would any human beings suffer.