Bamboo Door


Christian Yeo

Issue 3: Haunt, August 2024


** 

          The fluorescent lights stabbed at Musa’s eyes. Each ceiling light was manageable, a shard of malformed white and a penumbra that seemed to peel away in intensity, dissipating at the edges. All of the lights together—one after another, overlapping rank and file—seemed instead malevolent. The long hallway reminded him of hospitals, of airports, and, somehow, of the womb. It was strange.  
I should get it together, he thought, concentrating on the arc of his breathing, abiding the nausea that threatened to cave out from under him. 
The window is now, he thought, and there is no other way through. 
“Passport,” the border control said, clicking his mouse rapidly and looking at a screen just under Musa’s eyeline. 
Musa gave a quick smile, the vacant kind waitresses give as customers decide what to order, smoothened out his white linen shirt, and slid his passport through the hole in the Plexiglas. 
The border control flipped through the passport. He looked bored. Musa smiled through the screen again. The border control didn’t look up.  
Then, the border control paused at one of the pages, furrowing his brows. He seemed to be considering something, doing calculations. 
Oh fuck, Musa thought. His hands were wet. The border control’s belly strained tightly against his shirt. Musa could see a diamond of brown skin.
If this is how I am to go, Musa thought. 
Deciding it wasn’t, the border control continued rifling through the pages.
“Glad you enjoyed your stay,” he said, not looking at Musa.  
He nodded in his general direction. Momentarily confused, Musa clocked that the border control was nodding for the next person to come forward; behind him, a niqab-wearing mother and small child.  
“Thank you,” he said, sweeping past. 
The curls of the small child seemed to cascade onto the floor, so that everywhere, everything had to do with the mess of coiled hair. His heart threatened to escape his chest. 
Thank you, Khalil, he thought, thank you. Then, how sterile, these aviated tombs. 

** 

          One of the last things Musa saw of the world outside his apartment after the parties ended was a new café. That’s all they ever really were, these places he frequented. After a while they seemed to all blend into one singular, middle-class oasis: a beautiful coffee house, this one bespoke for its natural light spilling through the palm tree foliage, all over the wooden tables and bamboo chairs. It seemed almost cellular, this blending, this merging together across geographies, an organism with a wood-scented hive mind. 
Khaled rushed in, wiping sweat from his immaculate brow. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, hurrying over and hugging Musa.
Musa was doused suddenly with the smell of pine, and Khaled lingered for a couple of seconds before releasing him.  
“You’re good, don’t worry,” Musa said. 
“I had to do laundry before I came out, it took like ten minutes longer than I’d thought it would have taken.” Khaled sat down. “You know how it is.” 
“Relax, you’re fine.”  
Khaled leaned back, making a show of catching his breath. Musa felt a pang in his chest, thinking about the time before the parties when all they’d been concerned with was climbing gyms and long hikes, ease of coexistence or conversation that seemed to stretch on for liquid miles in simultaneity. Those played in his mind like a film he’d seen in childhood and that he knew the substance but not the feeling of, and now when he reached for texture it was only workaholism and social obligation and routinised, angry, pressure-valve sex.
“Are you still going to continue doing it then?” 
A time passed. Musa, caught half-smile, said nothing.  
Khaled looked at his face. “I don’t know if it’s worth it,” he said, lighting up a Gitanes. “What you’re doing. The parties we’ve been running. We make a lot of money but they’re illegal and we’re going to get caught one of these days. Then it’s not just you and I that get fucked, but Hammudi and Assad too. I feel it in my body.”  
Musa stayed silent. He felt suddenly exhausted. It was hard to believe they’d once been best friends—they’d met at a party when Musa had first moved—who’d slipped over the indecipherable line into something else. Was that possible? To derealise a friendship, let alone tenderness.
“What is it? You can’t let go of the feeling of winning?” Khaled asked, prying. “Of success? You could do that with your regular job; you were doing that with your old job running guesthouses.” 
The waiter came over. Musa looked at Khaled looking at the young, skinny guy. They both ordered salads.  
“It’s not just that. I finally have my own thing. It belongs to me entirely. Everyone should have something like that, in an ideal world.”  
“It’s not an ideal world. You can’t tell a Syrian guy about an ideal world.”  
Musa was nonplussed. Khaled was so clearly a consultant. He hadn’t spent his college years doing case preps during lunches and compiling slide decks over many a summer for nothing. There was always a sense of waste, but the money was good enough for him to eat at expensive restaurants on the weekend and order tracts of minimalist-chic Japanese streetwear. Khaled was the sort to articulate the meaninglessness, alienation, and naked selfishness inherent in the vocation of a corporate shill, but he’d be damned if he gave up his lifestyle inflation for something as juvenile as “meaning”, or “ethics”.  
“He had large ears,” Musa said. “The waiter boy.”  
“What?”  
“You were checking him out.”  
Despite himself, Khaled laughed. It was a dry, hacking thing. Musa watched the two men opposite them, imagined them getting up from their seats, coming across to them. We know, they’d say, we know what’s actually up, and start beating them. He was getting hard at the thought. Their blood splashing onto the floor, staining the bamboo. 
“Where are you right now?” Khaled asked, following his gaze again. 
“You’re scared.”  
Khaled’s smile dropped. He looked like a dog that had been introduced to wolves.
“I’m pragmatic.” 
“What’s the difference? Either way, you’re throwing away a damned good thing. We struggled for all these years in this country and only now we’re reaping the benefits.”  
“I’m not the only one throwing away a damned good thing,” Khaled said. 

** 

         It was, Musa told everyone, the last party he would throw. Unlike how he presented himself, he was not engineered to thrive on risk. In this way he was unlike his partners, Hammudi and Assad. They’d all met at university, back home, at the Lebanese American University, and even back in school the two of them had been much more entrepreneurial, zealously risk-taking than he’d been. Their modalities were different—Assad belonged to the school of braggadocio while Hammudi was clear-eyed, almost hawk-like—but they fundamentally seemed to enjoy splashing about in the shit, whereas Musa only tolerated it. 
Then they’d all moved to Riyadh. It was ’06, around the time Israel had started with the rockets in the South. 
“My parents didn’t live through the war so I’d have to deal with this shit too,” Hammudi had said. They were at a bar in Mar Mikhael.  
Assad took him up on it. “We don’t have to sit here and take it, yani,” Assad said, wiping his nose, the remnants of the lines they’d done before coming out.  
Assad watched a woman across the bar; Musa knew she was the type he always went for, and he expected him to make a move later in the night. Glittery eye shadow, work done on the nose bridge and cheek bones, short cling dress. Francophonic and trilingual before she’d been a thought in the manicured frontal cortex of her Maronite parents.  
Then they’d both turned to Musa, expectant and barrelling, their handlebar moustaches mirroring each other in the dim light of the bar.  
“Yes,” Musa had said, eager to please and slightly drunk. He was mostly grateful for the friendship of funnier, better-looking men than he. He was accompanied by the swell of bravado and never-ending tide of tequila shots and arak. It carried the precipitous feeling that always accompanies these sorts of decisions, a sense of destiny and the universe giving you what you deserved. What was yours was yours; he was tired. And he would follow his friends, drunk and freshly graduated and callow and virile as they all were. The world was large and conquerable and life would be good to them.  
That had been ten years ago.  
In the beginning they’d all found jobs in different places: Assad the advertising major found a job proofing TV ads in a midsized telecommunications company, Hammudi a junior role in a software engineering start-up, and Musa himself had joined the hospitality business, working in an intentionally small team running a coalition of guesthouses across major neighbourhoods in Riyadh and Jeddah. They’d started scouting out other Lebanese people in  the capital. They shopped for groceries at the kinds of places they wouldn’t have gone to back home. They had a series of sustained flirtations with increasingly younger women. 
Every week they met for drinks at Musa’s apartment, first at a small studio he could barely afford, that he paid for to guard his rabid obsession with clean kitchen countertops, and then at a larger one he moved into when his guesthouse team took off. They complained about being the only Lebanese in teams full of Saudis. They talked about how little they were making, how expensive things were, wasn’t it a strange feeling to have water and electricity and nothing to do, how much they sent back, how hot the desert was. Mostly though, they talked about Lebanon, before they’d left after another Israeli assault. 
Sometimes Musa caught sight of the three of them from above, or as a flash in the mirror, and he felt like crying. Then he squashed it, or rather it was repressed almost instantly from years of practice—and they were back to the present, three college friends who’d moved together in the search for a better life. 
“Do you ever think,” Musa said laughingly, “back then we’d have imagined this?”
“We’re like old men,” Assad said approvingly. 
“Not even thirty,” Musa said. He felt a wildness in his chest. “Already talking like we’re dead.” 

** 

         Later, when they were fucking, their bodies slipping underneath each other golden with  sweat, Khaled flipped Musa over.  
“My turn,” he said, wearing his smile, and then entered him roughly.  
Musa’s face was pressed into a pillow, muffling his voice. Musa thought about the possibility of oranges, how he’d grown up surrounded by them and now ate them no longer. He couldn’t see Khaled; the experience from his vantage point precluded the visuality of the experience, but he pictured the sense of triumph on his face, the imprint of desire. 
Afterward, they lay next to each other. Khaled was panting and unwoven.
“Thank you,” Khaled said. “For being so attentive to me.”  
“Always,” Musa said, struggling to catch his breath, “that’s my trick.”  
There was a long pause, one of those postcoital ones that seemed to stretch languorously and snake between their spent bodies. The sheets were spotted with dampness. Musa’s corner lamp was wrapped in the spectre of warm light. 
“I think I might love you,” Khaled said.  
Musa said nothing, could think of nothing to say, could only conceptually access a pleasant surprise, one that he knew was expected of him to perform if not possess. The room smelled like their bodies. From somewhere below them, he could hear the sound of cars.  
“What could come of it?” Musa said.
“I’m only saying what’s true. I have no interest in what’s interesting, or useful.” 
Anything could have been below them, and everything was. Both their gazes were trained on the ceiling, parallel to each other. Musa was acutely aware of the turning ceiling fan, the shadows flitting cyclically across the plaster.  
“I don’t know if you noticed,” he said finally, turning over and looking at Khaled, “but there was even a bamboo door in the café.”  
“I didn’t see it,” Khaled said easily, his voice barely catching. “But of course it had a bamboo door.”  
There was a shadow of something animal, and Musa felt suddenly like he had when he was sixteen and just run over a cat, as if he had killed that which had done nothing but go about its life with an utmost sincerity. 
Khaled rearranged his face. He shook his head slowly. “I can’t believe,” he said, “we fetishise the Japanese so much now.”  
“I don’t even think bamboo is a Japanese thing.”  
“No way.”  
“Yeah, I think it might be Chinese.”  
“Either way, I think the point stands.” 

** 

         The organisation of each party was something of a Greek logistical myth. The three of them took almost a week to set up each underground event, and sank in a good couple of thousand dollars, on top of all their waking hours. By the time of the parties themselves, they were too exhausted to do much more than smoke moderate amounts of hashish in a trailer they hired, next to the party where they were insulated from everything but the thrumming, regularly timed bass of techno music. 
First they had to scout out a location. Musa was in charge of this. He drove out with Khaled in a sleek, black Range Rover, and they would trundle and trundle for hours on end, looking for a suitably large canvas to build their little techno-palaces. The others didn’t mind leaving this to Musa; it was, they reasoned, just road trips with his best friend. On these trips Khaled and Musa would inspect various sites for secrecy and efficacy, and occasionally if the spot was deserted enough they would attend to other things. On these snake-oiled grounds Khaled was most attuned: he was, after all, a McKinsey man engaging in a second adolescence on his teleworking days. 
Next they would start looking for a DJ. Assad was in charge of this: as a  communications major he’d been the freest of all of them in university, and consequently he’d become known as the cheapest DJ available. At first he’d only known Jay-Z and remixed Amy Winehouse; it was only later, once he realised that sex appeal in alternative circles often correlated to the extent that one could be identified as a member of the underground, that he began to move toward the fringe. Now, out of some accident of interest or prolonged method acting, he had the most facility with the underground music scene in Riyadh, and he thus paid frequent visits to friend-of-a-friend DJs in their apartments, where they would listen to some of the mixes, smoke shisha, and make Turkish coffee that nobody would drink. Generally speaking, he tried his best to blend into the leftist-alternative party scene, and was largely inoffensive enough to successfully do so. Networking and music-finding were generally the only things Assad could be relied on to do, so do them with greatly exaggerated tales of his prowess he did.  
Thus they began the process of physical assembly. To begin with, they had hired  contractors to do the entire thing: they came in with their equipment and skilled nous and South Asian, Afghani, Yemeni kafalas. Every day one of them would come out to supervise everything; the contractors worked impressively fast, though they had to be paid off to keep quiet about what was going on. This worked spectacularly until one time, two of the workers died on the way to get some materials; they had run out of gas in the car (the Saudi manager had wanted to cut costs, and so thought they would be able to make it, or, failing which, that they would be able to walk the last few miles or so), and duly died, out of dehydration, starvation, and heat exhaustion.  
“I had Do Not Disturb on,” laughed the Saudi manager to Musa, the day after they found the bodies. 
“Wait, so—” Musa said, realisation slowly dawning. They were standing in the middle of the desert, the tentage still being built around them by black and brown bodies, their Saudi bosses barking orders on the side. 
“Yeah, I was wondering why I had thirty-nine missed calls,” the Saudi manager said, shrugging and adjusting his Oakley sunglasses. “Oh, well.”  
And so on. After that, the four of them decided that it would just take a sufficiently prominent international activist, human rights organisation, or even just an influencer trying to catch the latest populist-political wave, to catch wind of what had happened and for there to be a costly, potentially fatal disaster.  
The next event, though, was a near-disaster. Three days out from the event, Musa had landed himself in the hospital for accidentally sawing into his hand, Assad had tapped out of the various tasks he had been assigned, and Hammudi was the only one who had acquitted himself in any way reminiscent of a potentially acceptable construction worker.  
“Let’s call one of those companies,” Hammudi said glumly.  
“Yeah, I think we should call the calvary,” Musa said. “We’re hopeless at this.”  
The two of them were once again in the desert, surrounded by unused wood, metal and canvas. They hadn’t even started on anything interior. 
“Where the fuck is Assad by the way?” Hammudi asked. “Or Khaled?” 
“Khaled is in the office today,” Musa snapped back. “Don’t get on his case.” 
Musa was surprised at the show of annoyance from Hammudi, normally the most even-tempered of the three. He held his heavily bandaged hand, looking mournfully at his Range Rover. Inside, Assad was using his phone, probably scrolling his Instagram feed with the air-conditioning switched to full blast. The three of them had grown up as part of an educated, moneyed elite in another country where all the physical labour had been outsourced, and it showed; they were more likely to tell you where the best spots for parking in Badaro were than to operate an electric saw. 
The next day, two companies came down. When they’d asked one of them for the job, they’d said they wouldn’t be able to do it without a partner company. The same manager emerged from a Lexus, a new pair of Oakley sunglasses atop his head. 
Behind him, lorries full of kafalas hurtled towards them.  
Of course, they pulled off the event. The attendance was the hugest yet, of any of the parties. The numbers came in at twenty thousand. The after party, at one of the princes’ accommodations, lasted till ten am. Each of the three of them, after all the overheads, took back eighty thousand dollars. It was simply the way of things; whenever Musa imagined the two workers—their bodies decomposing by the time they’d been found, their families waiting for their calls, their fathers, their sons, their brothers—he shut off the thought. If he was to enjoy the spoils, it did no good to be sentimental about the costs of war. 
The final thing, then, was the branding. It was Assad’s idea, as a merchant of exclusivity. “Let’s call it “The Family”, he said. “And let’s make it invite only.”  
Musa and Hammudi were silent.  
“Why not charge for entry?” Hammudi said diplomatically.  
“Of course we will,” Assad said impatiently. 
“And we only let in people with chicks,” Khaled added. Musa felt a surge of pride in his chest.
“Ya’allah, think bigger. We need socialites, we need influencers, we need artists, we need oil businessmen, we need royalty,” Assad said.  
Musa recognised the gleam in his eye. “People will only come if they feel grateful they’ve been chosen, if there’s a chance we could turn them away at the door, even. It’s exactly like those clubs in Berlin. It’ll be the shit because it’s illegal, but also because you have to be handpicked.”  
So that’s what they did.  
True enough, out of their list of two hundred and fifty initial invitees, two hundred and forty-nine showed up. The one that didn’t, they later found out, died of a cocaine overdose on the night he received the invite. He’d been doing blow with a couple of influencers he’d flown in from Malaysia to shit on his face, all of whom he’d paid in designer handbags. When they found him, the room was covered in blow, fecal matter, and empty Burberry, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton handbag boxes. He’d been twenty-eight. 
The parties got bigger and bigger. The DJs got more and more famous. Afterparties organised themselves, taking place till noon. The four of them were always invited and never went. They began to outsmart the typical nightlife crowd; they asked the bouncers to shunt the female influencers and models to the front, for the photographers to get them in the rave videography. They banned date rape drugs and heroin, they didn’t allow phones and subjected all entrants to full-body checks to ensure it, and they provided a free-flow supply of alcohol and party drugs (ket, molly, E). The craziness amped up; they had firebreathers one party, and female gladiators another. Assad himself always played a set or two, and always the three of them only spent fifteen minutes soaking in what they had created, before retiring to their trailer to nap or watch Korean dramas. All of this made it inevitable that they would eventually be caught.  

** 

         “Welcome back,” Maryam said, giving Musa a huge hug.  
Letting out a shout, he dropped his black duffel bag and squeezed her, lifting her into the air and smothering her cheeks with kisses. He could have actually sobbed; he’d made it through the airports and the customs with barely a second glance, and here he was, back home being picked up by an old high school friend. The parties—the possibilities they had opened up, and their quick cessation—stretched out behind him.
Maryam laughed. “Hello, you,” she said, and he detected a hint of possibility. Are we flirting already? He released her back onto the floor.  
“You look good,” he said with a smile, reaching out and tugging on one of her curls. 
“You’ve lost weight,” she said, twisting out of his grasp. “You look even better.” 
She helped him pick up his bags and they headed out the doors of the airport and into the carpark, toward their car. He stopped dead in his tracks. 
“Oh shit,” he said. “You still drive Clover?” 
It was the car Maryam had bought a few summers before, the last time he’d visited Beirut. The car was a small, bright red Ford; it looked like a ladybug from a child’s playbook, not a serious car but inevitably the kind Maryam would drive to death. 
“The bags will fit,” Maryam said, reading his mind. “Don’t worry, we’ll just slide the seats forward.” 
She unlocked the door and got in the driver’s seat. He struggled to unlock the door. “Can you—?” he started, before cutting himself off mid-question.  
Maryam peeked her head up above the roof of the car and tutted. 
“Let me—” she started, getting out of her seat to help him. “You have to—”  
Musa panicked, squeezing the handle of the door hard. Out of pure luck, he managed to get the button on the inside of the handle, unlocking the door.  
“Got it,” he called out in relief.  
Maryam shook her head and got back in the car. Then they were driving, out past the toll booth who asked for a couple of dollars for parking and speeding out through the streets into Beirut. Everything was unlit and beautiful.
“I was thinking we could get a drink,” Maryam said. 
“Sure,” Musa said, grazing her elbow. “I could use a drink.”  
“Yalla,” she said, her eyes on the road. 
At the bar, Maryam immediately ordered them a round of Dudu shots.
“To your return,” she said, not meeting his eyes. 
Is Maryam into me or not? he wondered. 
Later, as they stumbled back to the car, Maryam grabbed Musa’s arm and kissed him on the neck. He touched his nose to hers. She was as young as he remembered, and happier. He kissed her, his hand sliding up her shirt. She pushed him away; he was confused and then he saw a playfulness and then they were up against the car.  
“Let’s go back to mine,” she said. Her voice was Khaled’s voice, musky and real. He knew that this was what he had to do, the only way to break the love of his life and excise it completely: to forget Khaled he had to betray him, not in spite of but because he had put his neck on the line. Here was a beautiful woman from his past, available and gym-toned and soft; if he fucked her, he would be a man who cheated on the partner who risked his life so he could have his. He would become unworthy; he would become shame itself. He would never let himself entertain the possibility, and so finally, roiling with unforgivable, unalterable things, they would let each other go. 
“Yes, let’s go to yours” he said, almost crying with relief. 
The next day, woken by sunlight filtering in through the window, he slipped out of bed. Maryam was still asleep, her mussed hair a tangled mess. 
Musa felt drained of desire. He slipped on his briefs, walked out of her master bedroom. There was no one else in the house. He made himself a coffee and added too much milk. Grimacing, he ambled over to the couch, and plonked himself down. He was not a greedy person, he told himself, this was all money he had earned. It was just so that he would never have to think about money ever again, he had more than enough to live how he wanted. Musa could taste the future that lay before him. He would not have love, but he would have everything else. He checked his phone.  
Fuck, he thought. Fuck. 
“The money’s mine,” Khaled had texted him. “Have a good life.” 
“Motherfucker,” he said aloud, in shock, and fury, and wonder. He shook his head in amazement. It was the stuff of legends, the stuff of dreams. He tried to call Khaled, knowing what he would see. 
He’d been blocked.  
At this, Musa hurled his phone across the room.  

** 

         “They’ve put the police on rotation below the apartment,” Musa said. He was on the phone to Khaled. “There’s always a guy there.”  
“Are you sure it isn’t just people loitering?” Khaled said. “Or maybe they’re just  waiting to pick people up.”  
When they’d come for the four of them, the police had swept in without drama or fanfare. One second the boys were having their biggest party yet, and the next they were being arrested and brought to the police station for individual questioning.  
The problem, they explained there, was that a woman had almost died at their party. She’d overdosed while dancing on one of the glass tables surrounded by Saudi businessmen; then she’d gone and fallen, breaking the table. One of the shards, long as a spear, had pierced her through her ribs and come out the other side. 
“The glass shard missed her spine by 10 milimetres,” the constable questioning Musa told him. “Any more and she would have been paralysed for life.”  
Musa weighed up his options.
The constable whipped him in the face. “She could have died,” he said. 
When Musa was eventually released from questioning, they sent him straight back to his apartment. There, he didn’t leave for 2 months. He was still under investigation; his passport was disabled, and his bank accounts frozen. Every night he got takeout and paced the apartment, rabid with anxiety. He masturbated four times a day, watched pornography with a sense of having other things to do. Whenever Khaled got the chance, he called him; but even this got old, and he could sense Khaled’s annoyance on the phone. 
“Here’s the thing,” Khaled said one night, renewed urgency in his voice. “If you stay, I think you’re dead. What you need to do is, didn’t you have a cousin who knows a prince?”  
“Yeah, they went to school together,” Musa said. “Aren’t you dead too?
“Exactly,” Khaled said. “Exactly. Get him to ask for your passport and bank account to be unfrozen. Book a ticket to Lebanon. You’ll be safe there. Give me all your details and I’ll get the money to you somehow, maybe I’ll draw it all out in cash when I got to Beirut. If only one of us has a chance of getting out, I’d like it to be you.” 
“Why would you do that?” Musa said. He was standing on his balcony, looking out at the sea of glittering lights in his apartment complex. “You’re dead if they catch you helping me.”  
“If you ask for the right favours,” Khaled said, barking out his dry, hacking laugh, “it’ll be fine.”  
“Still,” Musa said. “You could die.” 
“I know that. I want to help.” 
“Thank you,” Musa said, meaning it. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He  paused. A possibility emerged before him. 
“You don’t trust me,” Khaled said, reading the silence. “I love you, I would never do anything to betray you.” 
There was another pause, and silence on the phone.  
“Hello?” Khaled said. “Hello, are you still there?” 
“No,” Musa said, guilt playing in his shadow. “No, I trust you.”  
“Send me the details once you talk to your cousin and it all goes through.” 
“Got it. I will.”  
“Don’t forget.” 
“I won’t.”  
“Everything is on the line for this. Your life and mine.”  
“At least it’s not your life or mine,” Musa said.  
“I guess not,” Khaled said, then that laugh again. “Good night.”  
“Good night.”  
After hanging up the phone, Musa stayed on his balcony. He lit a cigarette. He looked at the sea of impersonal apartments, the sleek, apparently modern architecture. He thought about the neighbourhood he’d grown up in, the civil war damage and half-started, half-finished multifarious recovery of it all. He’d once thought that he would never leave, that he would find love here where his parents had found love and their parents before them, despite the wars or because of them. He thought about Hammudi and Assad and Maryam, friends whom he loved and knew like his own body, his hands and his feet and his neck and his shoulders; he thought even of people he saw every day but knew only a little, the manoushe shop and nescafe guys, the corner shop regulars and the argileh men by his roundabout, how he was fond of them even so, and whom would never be able to leave.  
How lucky he was, Musa thought, to have taken all the detritus life had thrown him, and then to have found someone who would never do him harm, who would give everything so he had a shot at something. That was something precious few people got in their life; so this was what he had to show for.

Christian Yeo Xuan is a writer and actor based in Paris. His poetry has been published notably in The Mays and Gaudy Boy’s New Singapore Poetries, among others. He won the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize, placed 2nd for the Aryamati Poetry Prize, came in 3rd for the National Poetry Competition (Singapore), and was shortlisted for the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, the Bridport Prize, and the Sykes Prize. He received a scholarship to attend the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop and has worked with the Asia Creative Writing Programme and Berlin Writer’s Workshop. He is currently at work on a poetry collection and a novel.

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