My family's personal experiences

Why this series

A book we are writing together.

Culture is not a list of customs. It lives in families — in the meals an older sister organised at sixteen, in the names we use for the people we love, in the language parents keep teaching children in a new country.

This series holds our own family's memories alongside the interviews, recipes, and history guides. It is also a way of saying, to the migrant workers, students, and diaspora families on this site: you are not a separate story. You are the same story, told again and again.

Each chapter is a record of our family's history, gathered through interviews that we conduct with the people who lived it — parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles — then written in their own voices with their full review and consent. The book grows chapter by chapter, published one at a time.

Chapter 01

Published · Memoir

1967: The year our world turned upside down

An eleven-year-old remembers the Anti-Chinese riots of Rangoon, the hundred days that followed, and the father who came home.

Read Chapter One →

Chapter 02

Published · Memoir

1975: To love is to provide

A grandmother remembers marrying in 1975, building a market stall under Ne Win's rationing, and the belief that shaped her life.

Read Chapter Two →

Chapter 03

Published · Memoir

1988: The year we left

A boy loses both parents, fails Grade 10 five times, survives the 1988 uprising — and finds a way to bring his family to Singapore.

Read Chapter Three →

Chapter 04

New · Memoir

1990: New roots

The daughter of the family that left Yangon remembers growing up in Singapore — the Peninsula Plaza weekends, the mother who never gave up, and what it meant to plant new roots.

Read Chapter Four →