Epigram Books

“Small people need to talk more loudly to be heard.
Well I'm small aren't I, I'm not even 1.6 metres tall, but you don't see me raising my voice.
Maybe you're okay with not being heard.
I just want to be heard by the right people. The right person.”
― Amanda Lee Koe, Ministry of Moral Panic

“Time will solve all the problems Chinese school graduates face. In our bilingual society, there are no more Chinese school graduates, only English school graduates who can speak Mandarin. These English school graduates probably can also read and write Chinese, but they did not go to a Chinese school, and they act and think differently from us. Drawing a line between us, they would never say they graduated from a Chinese school, because former Chinese school graduates, that is, the vanishing group of people that includes us, are second-class citizens. They, on the other hand, belong to the first class, the Chinese elite, English school graduates who are fluent in Chinese.”
― Yeng Pway Ngon, Trivialities About Me and Myself

“Coincidence sometimes happens as in a fairy tale. Wong was in an emotional state of mind. Still smoking opium, he thought about Kwang’s long-dead father, who had arrived in Singapore from Amoy on the junk Nam Hong. The opium den now felt bare and lonely without all the old vibrations. It was also dark and damp and the small kerosene lamp was running low on fuel. Wong added more kerosene and mumbled to himself, “Tonight I am going to smoke my way to heaven!”
― Ming Cher, Spider boys

“The deaths—tiny ones, false ones, real ones—we undertake in the name of love are the closest that we ever come to greatness.”
― Amanda Lee Koe, Ministry of Moral Panic