The Workshop · The Cartographer
The Atlas
the life as a single line
One route, thirteen stops. It leaves Bangkok in 1981 and, forty-five years and three continents later, arrives back in Bangkok. The cities he returned to — Bangkok, Boston, Shanghai — are drawn as interchanges: a hollow ring means he had stood there before. The line is not drawn to scale. No life is.
Born on a Sunday, near a hotel shaped like a hat. The house his father built.
The shop — 發祥 — the cousins, one television for the whole neighbourhood.
The exchange year. A bar in Cambridge, and the idea of Boston, glimpsed.
KMITL. Three thousand hours in the library, where nobody was watching.
MIT, on a Fulbright. Stanford Anderson: good writing is clear writing.
First sight, from the elevated road off the airport. The Bund, in the flesh at last.
On a Harvard-Yenching grant. The English class system, encountered.
Harvard, the doctorate, the two percent. His father dies, week one.
A resident at last. Three years, a bicycle by the Huangpu, and a girl who may not have been real.
The curb. The worst year of his life — which he would only later learn was the best.
A visiting chair, brokered by a friend. Christopher, Akeen, Max, Martina.
A post taken because Singapore said no — and left, for a reason still on its way back.
Home. Two Thai dogs, the smart cities, a hundred days of questions. The arc is closed.