AustLit

'For reasons sufficient to the writer, as ‘Papa’ would say, certain places, people and words have been left out of these notes. Some are secret and some are known by everyone. There is, for instance, no mention of the row of shophouses in Bugis Junction, with their 19th Century carvings of flowers and patterned panels and broken wooden shutters, among them his childhood home, that he tore down when he grew up, nor of the jade green and lotus pink Peranakan tiles of a girls’ school, nor of dilly dallying, nor of Mt Sinai and Tan Kim Cheng and Goodwood and Randy Wick, nor of the sour smell of her breath when she kissed me and drank coffee from a condensed milk can and rolled white Gardenia bread into little balls between her fingers and sat and ate with one elbow resting on a raised knee. These notes are the straying and breaking of the root of an utterance, the strange fruit of constraint.' (Introduction)

'In his short story ‘A Little Ramble’, champion of the anti-heroic Robert Walser says, ‘We don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much’. In her third collection, Painting Red Orchids, Singaporean Australian Eileen Chong testifies to ordinary experience as the sensory and emotional kaleidoscope of the individual. These are the lyrical portraits of a perpetual itinerant, her introverted recordings of private joys, loneliness and fascination with solitary journeying through a rich inner world. Sensorial and intellectual curiosity abound in her peripatetic wanderings any place and any time: Sydney’s Chinatown, Parramatta, the seaside, the Australian goldfields, Tang dynasty China, a friend’s kitchen.' (Introduction)