If Bhutan the country is little known to the outside world—its snow-capped Himalayan peaks having shrouded it in mystery for centuries—its nascent contemporary art scene is all but invisible. Most visitors (and there are only around 100,000 a year) come to trek amongst those mountains and marvel at the ancient dzongs, the imposing fortresses that dot the countryside. They're drawn here too by the quirks of modern Bhutan: a monarchy that voluntarily ceded power in 2008 to usher in democracy; the much-vaunted notion of Gross National Happiness, which sets quality of life ahead of economic output; an—in no small way—by just how damn special the experience of being here feels (the US$200-250/day tourist tariff may not be universally popular but it's certainly kept the worst excesses of the modern travel industry at bay).

It's not that these visitors won't come across any art. Says Thimpu-based artist Rinchen Wangdi, "Art is deeply integrated into Bhutanese life. It's just that most artistic practice is associated with religion." Bhutan has a long and rich history of Tibetan or tantric Buddhism, and wherever you travel in the country you'll see astounding works of sculpture and painting; as well as multi-hued, intricately handwoven fabrics selling for upward of $1,000. There are no less than 13 official Bhutanese arts and crafts. But the focus is squarely on the traditional and, as Tashi Payden, a close friend of the artists and founder of Bhutan's RSPCA, points out, "we don't want to be seen just as a living museum."

With that in mind, artists like Rinchen are exploring contemporary Bhutanese issues (particularly environmental degradation) through their experimental mixed-media work. "Art is not about creating beautiful things," he says. "It's about the message." He readily admits the scene is still in its infancy. "We have a long way to go. Most of our buyers come from developed nations; we can't expect local people to buy this kind of work yet. So to sustain ourselves, we have to do commercial, educational work. We've had some government support, but to really keep art alive we need institutions. We need galleries, educators, magazines, art collectors. All of this is lacking at the moment."

A key figure in what progress there has been to date is Asha Kama, another artist combining traditional techniques with modern influences. Together with two friends he set up VAST (Voluntary Artists’ Studio, Thimphu; www.vast-bhutan.org), an NGO providing arts schooling and, more recently, an exhibition space. "There's no market to speak of for our kind of art," he says. "Traditional craftsmen are in good demand. But as a country we lack the love for and understanding of modern art. Abstract and self-expressive art just isn't appreciated." So, in the absence of formal art institutions, VAST was set up to offer would-be artists (including Rinchen, who was one of their first students) encouragement and direction. "Now, 16 years later, we have a lot of young artists working independently. Struggling but surviving," he says. Of his own work he explains that, having toyed with both modern disciplines ("everyone's a graphic designer now!") and traditional religiously-inspired techniques ("People keep this kind of work in their sacred places and I found I wasn't sufficiently committed spiritually"), he's working across the two. "I'm painting Buddha, but Buddha in my own way"—a fair summation of how this small group of like-minded artists are tackling the transition from old to new. 

So while the Bhutanese modern art scene is by no means big enough to base an entire trip around, as a counterpoint to your wanderings through the more traditional landscapes and tapestries of Thimpu (including the stunning Thimpu Dzong, which faces the Royal Palace across the river), some time spent exploring the handful of contemporary galleries makes a worthy add-on to any trip. The artists are refreshingly free of pretension and happy to sit and talk shop, and in both their conversation and their works you get a fascinating insight—and an often controversial at that—into how this long closed-off country is wrestling with modernization. Singaporean visual artist Erwin Lian, a.k.a. Cherngzhi, a part-time lecturer at Ngee Ann Poly, found it so inspiring he’s been back several times. “Actually, I had my fair share of doubt and cynicism when I first landed,” he says. “The Bhutanese tourism board markets it as the happiest place on earth. I thought: Perhaps they are trying to hide the ‘real’ Bhutan from an outsider. But I went exploring by myself—even sketching on the street at night—and it was so idyllic and peaceful. And while not everyone there is happy, they’re fulfilled. I’ve tried to capture the essence of just being there ever since.”

Works by all of the above artists will be on show at the Impressions of Happiness exhibition, which runs from April 12-17, 11am-7.30pm at Sculpture Square (155 Middle Rd.). Part of the proceeds from artworks sold will go to helping underprivileged young artists in Bhutan. There will also be a book launch (see below) and screenings of two Bhutanese films (April 12, 2-7pm). Find out more at www.drukasia.com/impressions. 

Exploring beyond Thimpu

Bhutan is unusual in that its only international airport serves the town of Paro, not the capital, an hour's drive away. Fortunately, Paro is much more than just a waypoint and you'd be remiss not to spend at least a few days there. Among the highlights is Paro Taktsang, or Tiger's Nest, a 17th-century monastery perched high on a cliff-face some 900 meters above ground—a solid four-hour return hike. 

Stay at Uma Paro, a gorgeous estate set amidst 38 acres of lush blue pine forest on a hill overlooking the town. It's a popular spot for executive retreats—and with an in-house COMO Shambhala spa, traditional wood-fire Bukhari stoves warming up the bar and restaurant and trails leading off in every direction up and down the mountainside it's easy to see why. Rooms start from US$450 ($570)/night.  

What does Bhutanese cuisine taste like? Find out at The Soup Spoon. Plus, read our interview with Dr. Karma Phuntsho, author of The History of Bhutan.

Having originally come to China with the Peace Corps, Michael Meyer won the Whiting Writers’ Award for his first book The Last Days of Old Beijing (2008), an account of the two years he spent living in a soon-to-be-demolished hutong, or old neighborhood, in the Chinese capital. The book was never published in China—allegedly because of the slightly different shading of Taiwan on an introductory map—but has recently been translated for both the Mainland and Taiwan.

Meyer is currently Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Pittsburgh as well as a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong. His next book, In Manchuria, to be published in 2014, recounts his experiences living on a rice farm and travelling (or, in his own words, “bumming”) around northeastern China.

We caught up with him on tour in Hong Kong.

So the new book is something of a homage to In Patagonia?
Sometimes when you’re writing a book you have this subconscious fear that it’ll be the last book you’ll ever write, so you’d better do the best one; do the things you want to accomplish as a writer. I’ve always loved Bruce Chatwin's In Patagonia more than any other book, and I’ve always been drawn to north-eastern China (Dongbei, as it’s now known) more than any other region of China, so I thought it’d be nice to do an episodic narrative about a place; using place as a character.

I thought I was going to be writing a book about the Japanese invasion, the Soviet era; something more historical. But drop down anywhere in China and you’re going to end up writing a book about change, and usually massive change. So I realised I’d rather do something more personal, shorter scale, more fun.

And maybe more real? You don’t want to get posthumously slammed like Chatwin. However good the writing.
I’m really sad to see how over the years Chatwin’s books, and Capote’s and Joseph Mitchell’s, have been eroded so much. And you wonder, ‘why did they do that?’, ‘why did they elide the truth?’ That’s one thing I like about this book [Last Days] being translated into Chinese. These are real people, and they’re going to tell people if it’s fake. As a non-fiction writer, you have your reputation and nothing else.

And when it comes to China writing there’s just so much bullshit; because there’s no easy way for an overseas audience to verify it.
Of course. It’ll be interesting with the Manchuria book, now that I know Chinese people will be reading it, how that’ll change how I’m writing. I’ve noticed that I’m very good at self-censorship anyway after living in China for so long; but even my descriptions of things, I wonder what’ll be different.

I love Ian Frazier and when I read his books about traveling in America he’s always talking about driving and what’s on the radio, or the local high school mascots, or he goes to the museum. In China you’re showing up to a tabula rasa; you have to dig for this stuff, it doesn’t exist.

So it’ll be really important for me to include my historical sources, because so many of them are in Chinese. It’s not just some laowai saying this.

How else do you think your writing has changed since Last Days?
I think my voice has changed, because I’ve been teaching literary journalism for a couple of years now. I’ve been teaching so much Orwell and Didion and Kapuściński and Octavio Paz and writers I admire so much, and I’m seeing what they do that works so well. And the real secret is that they have scenes with beginning and ends and when they do set pieces for their summaries they’re short, and they keep you turning the page; something is at stake.

And, of course, your reasons for writing the book are somewhat different this time.
You look at the Beijing book and it’s really the work of a drowning man. It’s me in a London hotel, with hockey bags full of notes, trying to assemble a book for the first time in a mere seven weeks. Now I’m much more prepared.

This time around, the Taiwan, Hong Kong and Chinese publishers have already signed contracts so it’ll be translated simultaneously and all come out at the same time, hopefully next year.

And I’m leaving this for my son now. That’s not to say I’m self-censoring idiocy or drunkenness or whatever, but I have him in mind as an audience now—I want him to see what his father saw, because it won’t be there by the time he’s ready to travel there.

Living somewhere is rather different from travelling through it. What was it like putting down roots in Dongbei?
I thought it’d be great. I thought I’d move into my wife’s family’s little village; but instead, because my wife’s family had left, what’s there now is third cousins and distant aunts, and there’s a real rift between the people who have stayed and those who’ve left. The Spanish have a saying that there’s no hell like a small village. Also, I found writing about family much harder than writing about strangers. So after the first year I actually moved one village over so I could have my own space.

So you left Beijing looking for space and…
…found myself in another small village! I know, right.

It must be strange revisiting that first book now. Beijing’s moved on so quickly.
At times I feel like I’m an 85-year-old man lamenting the loss of this town in which I grew up and fell in love in and had my first job in. It only happened 10 years ago! But that’s the thing with cities. We’re always living on borrowed time in them; they change, despite our best intentions.

How did the translation come about?
It was a graduate student here at HKU who was the one! That’s amazing to me. She said I want to translate it and I’ll find a publisher for it. I didn’t think she could, because the English version had never been published there. But she did it.

Did much change from the English version?
Well she knows my sense of humor, she knows my voice. And she gets it. She’s a Beijing person; and she got hit by a taxi, and she’s laid up in hospital reading the translation out loud in an open ward with beds filled with old Beijingers, and she said she knew she was on the right path when they were reacting the way they were supposed to react to different passages.

I was surprised that the only things the publisher cut from the 400-page manuscript were three paragraphs from Ai Weiwei about how much he hates Beijing; but they kept the paragraph in about him distancing himself from the stadium, and his father’s demise in the Cultural Revolution. And they cut out three paragraphs about Tiananmen Square; when we’re looking at an official gazetteer of the Square’s history, and I just wrote down the entries for June 2, June 3 and June 4 1989—you know, “the heroic volunteers went out to aid the soldiers”, the kind of stuff I think is really interesting. But any mention of June 4 is a no. They even cut a reference to “the year after 1988.”

It’ll be interesting to see how it’s received when you introduce it in Beijing.
Right. Imagine if a Chinese person went to London and wrote a piece about “what Brixton really is” or “hey, Londoners you should be protecting these council estates!”

But I really do believe no-one knows that situation more than I do. Government officials can’t because they don’t live there, the residents don’t have the historical purview. So initially I think I’m going to be a little defensive about the laowai stuff; and not snap at something someone says.

Do I bring up the fact that De Tocqueville wrote the greatest book about America, or that Chatwin wrote the greatest book about Patagonia? And that Lao She wrote a book about London in the 1930s? Outsiders do usually write the best about places. But I don’t want to say that; else you’re the didactic prick.

What’s next, once you’re finished with In Manchuria?
I’m thinking next about writing about Shenzhen and Hong Kong’s divide; or about the hippies on Lamma. But then, after that, I do want to write about Taiwan; no-one’s writing about it. We need to record that now, too, in history, and where they’re at.

It’d be a lot smarter if I wrote a book about Benjamin Franklin; that’d sell a lot more and make life a lot easier. But someone explained to me years ago—and it was a good piece of advice—when you have ideas for library books, tuck those away, ’cause those are the ones you do when you’re 50, when you need to be at home with your kid. While you can still be on your feet, interviewing people, go out and do those books now.

One thing I like about book writing, that’s different than journalism, is that I feel like I’m part of something historical. I enjoy hearing the stories and the slowness of it all. I’m a really small fly in that ointment.

And, reassuringly, Chatwin must have felt the same way. All authors must, unless you’re someone like VS Naipaul, someone supremely confident of your place in literary history.
Paul Theroux’s tell-all notwithstanding.

Which is a great book, by the way. People assume it's vindictive, but it's really about the writing life.
I love that book [Sir Vidia's Shadow]. I'm always recommending that to people. That, and Steinbeck wrote a book called Journal of a Novel. He’s writing East of Eden and he’s writing a letter to his editor on the left hand page of the notebook, and East of Eden on the right. So this journal is a collection of Steinbeck sitting in front of the blank page every morning and saying “here we go again.” And it’s the most encouragement a young writer will ever need; even he faced that.

That it doesn’t get any easier. Do you struggle with that yourself?
Well, I chose the agent I chose because he said, “We’re not selling this book, we’re selling a whole shelf of your books, and in 40 years you’re going to have a whole shelf of your titles.” But in order for that to happen I have to start being a little bit quicker and more efficient. I really admire writers like Theroux who can crank books out.

Tash Aw’s first novel The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) earned him a Booker nomination and a Whitbread win. He followed that with Map of the Invisible World (2009), and has just released his third book, Five Star Billionaire. Set in contemporary Shanghai this latest work centers around five Malaysian expats chasing their dreams in the most exciting city on Earth.

Aw, born in Taiwan to Malaysian parents, moved to London in his teens and lived in Shanghai on and off during the writing of the book. Currently artist-in-residence at Singapore’s NTU, where he’s lecturing in creative writing, he spoke to Clara Lim and Ric Stockfis—at generous length—about how the story came together, what makes Shanghai so special, his career so far, and why Singaporeans ought to question things more.

Below is the text of the full interview with Tash Aw. (Great for saving to Instapaper or Pocket!) If you'd prefer to read specific excerpts, click on these links.

1. On Five Star Billionaire and personal reinvention
2. On old and new China
3. On censorship and (not) being a spokesperson
4. On living in and writing about Shanghai
5. On the art of writing
6. On literary culture in Singapore

Where did the idea for this latest story come from?

The moment I realised I could write the novel the way I wanted, was when I was sitting in a late-night Taiwanese dessert place in Shanghai. I heard some people talking with a Malaysian accent, so naturally I tuned in. The more they talked, the more I realised they were from the neighborhood I grew up in, in Kuala Lumpur. And they were talking about someone I’d known when I was a teenager and had lost touch with; and who was now a businesswoman in Shanghai! And from that moment on I kept running into Malaysians and Singaporeans in Shanghai in really unusual situations. Coincidence after coincidence.

I realised the bigger the city is, the chances of those kinds of coincidences are actually higher. When you’re a foreigner in a city you’re always looking out to make connections with people from your background. The old city is more important than the new. They’ve moved to Shanghai to try and recreate a life for themselves, but actually they find when they’re there that the old life is more important. You can never really successfully escape your roots.

But, of course, you have yourself spent a long time away from ‘home’. How do you think that’s shaped who you are?

You only really know who you are when you move away from your home.

Because Singapore’s so comfortable there’s no real need to go for Singaporeans to go and live abroad; and as a result it’s not easy for them to know who they are. The moment you go and spend any time abroad, immediately you know what it means to be British or Singaporean or Malaysian. It’s very hard to get that when you’re surrounded by sameness.

And Shanghai is rather different.

Shanghai is a city for reinvention. The whole book is about reinvention. I was so struck by how many people I met in Shanghai who had just completely reinvented themselves. You didn’t even have to know them to realise they’d done that. Some because they wanted a change. Some because they had to have a change. Some because they were escaping something.

Modern China and modern Shanghai allow you to do that, because no-one’s really interested in your past. No-one asks you where you’re from. No one asks you what your qualifications are. Elsewhere, people want to see your CV.  In modern China the only question is: can you do the job?

But it’s not always the easiest place to live.

I found it really, really exciting to begin with, but after a while it’s really tiring. I don’t know how people can keep up. There’s that frontier mentality. Everything’s up for grabs. And you’re not defending your patch in the same way you are in Singapore or Malaysia.

Not being able to get a taxi is a great way of seeing how China works in microcosm. It’s not personal if someone steals your cab. You just weren’t quick enough. Whereas, in London, it would be taken personally and be seen as a real act of aggression. In Shanghai you just have to be quicker than the next guy.

People are caught up in this constant movement; it’s like this river of energy. But no-one knows why they’re doing it; it’s like being on a treadmill. There’s still this big existential question of “why am I doing it?”, which no-one has time to stop and contemplate. The characters in the novel really want to stop, to get off the treadmill and see how they’re connected to their past, but they don’t have time to do that.

How does it feel when you go back to London from Shanghai?

Whenever I go straight there from China, it’s like going to a village. Then after a few weeks it feels really busy and interesting. I think London is more energetic than any other city in Europe, but it doesn’t have that constant motion or energy of Shanghai. I used to lie awake at night and watch the constant traffic on the elevated highway, even at midnight.

Shanghai is seen as this super-futuristic city. But its history is everywhere. Did you get a sense of how that affects the people who live there?

I think there’s something in the Chinese mentality that doesn’t really want you to think about what’s happened in the past. Because they had such traumatic recent history, they don’t want people to do that. When I went back for the residency [Aw was the inaugural M Literary Resident in Shanghai] I lived in a really nice building on Suzhou Creek. A really old building: it was one of the first art-deco blocks to be built in Shanghai but it had been remodeled inside over the years. All the people who lived there where all members of the same work unit and they’d worked in the same missile factory somewhere. They all ended up in this same apartment block, so they were all really old.

I had a tiny studio, with nothing to clean but I still had an ayi to come and do my stuff. She was exactly the same age as my neighbors, and she was incredibly optimistic, and she kept talking about how she was planning a tour of Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, and maybe next year she’d save up enough money to go to Europe. I always wondered how people like her could deal with having lived through the Cultural Revolution, as she would’ve lived through it completely. She had seen it from start to finish.

And you think the answer is that they simply don’t think about it.

Yeah, they’re on this super-fast expressway into the future. How can you square that with what you’re living with now? I don’t think I would be able to do that, it’s really hard. These people had to grind tree bark; one of my neighbors was telling me. They had to grind tree bark, to put into their rice, just to have enough to eat.

And if the lives of your children and grandchildren are getting so much better, what’s to be gained by dwelling on it.

Yes, exactly. And as a novelist, I try not to make any judgements. A lot of people are going to be expecting a message. They’re going to be expecting that I’ll say: new China is all about rushing off to get a lot of money, sacrificing too much. But that’s not what I’m saying. The message is not that clear when you get to the end of the book, it’s not that clear at all.

The standard thing in the West is to be really snobbish about Asia, about new Asia: “It’s all about money, there’s no culture.” And I always say to my friends, “But you can say that because you’ve already got money and you’ve been middle-class for a very long time.”

I don’t see why there should be a value judgment attached to people wanting to make money and live a certain lifestyle when they’ve never had those opportunities. But then, I guess, the thing to be balanced against that is if you pursue that at all costs, then you lose sight of where you’re from, of who you actually are. That means that two generations down the line, it’s going to be a little more difficult for people to hang on to that sense of perspective. But for now it’s still exciting.

And anyone who thinks they have the answer, or can provide the “message,” is probably a bit suspect.

We’re only a few years into this boom in China, so we have no idea how it’s going to turn out. We can anticipate, but we have no way of giving the answers.

Did you feel at liberty to write what you wanted; were you worried about censorship at all?

I felt completely liberated in saying what I wanted to say. Personally, I felt much less constrained in China than I do in Malaysia or Singapore. What I was seeing in Shanghai around me, contrary to what we think in the West, is that Chinese people have a really sharp sense of what is going on around them, they know politically what’s happening, and actually they say a lot of stuff, in blogs and in real life. Particularly in Shanghai, which has its own very strong cultural identity. People were very open about what they thought about the government. They’re not stupid. They’re very well informed and they can get the information they need.

If there was anything strong that I needed to say in a political sense, then it was really about Malaysia rather than China. People think about Malaysia and they think it’s about nice beaches and nice holidays—they don’t really think about it as somewhere with absolutely no freedom of press, blanket censorship, huge corruption.

Do people look to you to speak about these things?

No, not really. Ha Jin, the Chinese writer, wrote a really interesting essay on the writer as migrant and in it he says that, once you base yourself abroad, people don’t want you to be their spokesperson. They find it quite annoying. So I don’t set out to make any statements.

But for people of my generation, it was impossible to talk about a full and genuine experience of our growing up—and the characters in the book are my age, my generation—without talking about politics. Because in Malaysia, politics are in your face, all the time. What you can or cannot do is so governed by the politics of money and the politics of race. It’s just normal that when I talk about them growing up and becoming adults, that I would naturally talk about these kind of things as well.

Would you consider writing about the UK?

I just don’t feel ready to do it yet. I think that is because the UK is still where I spend most of my time. I have a less complicated relationship with the UK than I have with most of South-East Asia. It doesn’t trouble me the same way. And because my relationship is less complex with the UK, I don’t feel so compelled writing about it. I don’t feel the emotional need to write about it in the same way.

Were you writing about Shanghai while you were there?

I did write a certain amount in Shanghai; but it was mostly note-taking and research. I usually find it easier to write about a place when I’m not there, though. I find it much more helpful to be physically removed from a place, before I can write successfully about it. It gives me more objectivity and perspective. That’s another reason why I can’t write really well about the UK.

My problem with being in a place is that I have a tendency to be too faithful to the truth. When you’re not there, you feel like: I have the freedom to reinvent things. And sometimes reinventing details is more powerful than actually recording it in real life. That’s why so many holiday snaps are so flat. The reason why a particular viewpoint is so appealing to you is because you have the emotional connection, but then you just take a snap and you forget what’s important is the emotional link.

So how did you spend your time there?

Basically eating in restaurants and walking a lot! I would talk to a lot of random people. Shanghai is quite good for that because there are so many outsiders there. Not just foreigners, but also Chinese people who come from other parts of China to work there. They’re all keen to tell you their story, where they come from; you only have to express the slightest interest. Everybody is lonely and everybody is working so hard. If you just say where you’re from, you’ll get the whole story; how they got to Shanghai and why. So that’s really valuable. That all got distilled in to a lot of the characters. That was basically how I spent my time. I did a lot of reading and writing as well, but it was mainly just taking in everything.

Which probably doesn’t tally with most people’s perception of Shanghai as a place that’s moving way too fast for personal connections.

It is surprising. And it’s the personal things. Waiting in a queue in a restaurant, you engage in a conversation with the people next to you and they’re surprisingly open. Someone made a comment on my book, that all characters in the novel crave intimacy but don’t know how to get it. I think that’s right, because that’s basically what I observed in Shanghai. Everybody wanted to form friendships and relationships, but no one really knew how to do it. Everyone was convinced that they had no time. But actually all it took was for you to say, “what brought you to Shanghai?” And then you’d get this story, and a lot of people were surprised how easily the conversation flowed.

Yet one of the characters in the novel invests a lot of hope—and energy—in online dating; she’s striving for that personal connection.

I was really fascinated by dating in Shanghai. That too, has become this huge source of stress and anxiety, mainly for women in their thirties, who are under such pressure to get married. The pressure is from their family they say, but they don’t help matters by being incredibly demanding. They set up all these barriers between themselves and potential matches and then they complain that it’s impossible to find anyone.

I spent a lot of time going out with my female friends, people in their mid-thirties. And seeing how they’re going out and meeting men, stuff like that. I spent a lot of time in internet bars. That’s where you’d see, not in the middle of town, but further out, the waitresses on their one day off in the month, they’re all there online chatting to people, and observing that was really interesting. It’s surprising how much time that takes.

Is writing easier now that you’re not juggling being a lawyer?

As long as you’re remotely disciplined you can create your own structure. I was always quite clear that when I started writing full-time I would recreate the same kind of working conditions that everyone always has. I think ultimately writing is a job like everything else. You need to give it the respect of a job. I think writers always imagine that they're more important than other people and that their work is somehow more mysterious; that’s just disrespectful. That’s why, when I started writing full time, I was really determined to behave as if I had to turn up at a job like everyone else.

They say that if you work in an office and you wake up not feeling great or you’re having a bit of an off day, you have to go to the office anyway. You might not be very productive, but at least you’re there and you’re getting something done. If I wake up feeling terrible and just not feeling like writing, I’ll just write anyway, I’ll do something. I will work a whole day, because I think writing relies on that sort of rhythm and continuity.

Do you feel like you’re becoming a better writer?

I think I’m changing as a writer, I don’t know if it’s for better or worse. I think it’s really hard for writers to get a sense of that. I do feel like I’m developing as a writer, but it feels as if I’m still learning my craft.

With every work I write I’m always amazed by how much I learn about the process of writing. Not just the technical things I’m learning, but actually just how to be a writer, how to live with writing. With this book I learnt a lot; at some points it felt like I had to reinvent the wheel. That’s why writing is interesting. Every book has its own rhythm and its own demands. It would be quite sad, and really boring, if I ever got to the point where I was in a comfort zone.

Do you feel the pressure of earlier success?

Personally, I’ve learnt over the years to isolate myself. When I first got published, inevitably, you get caught up in the excitement. I wrote that book [The Harmony Silk Factory] over years and years in my basement flat in London, and I had no idea if anyone was going to read it, and then suddenly people are reviewing my book in the Sunday Times, and inviting me to Sydney and Stockholm. I got caught up in that excitement and thinking people actually gave a shit about what I had to say.

But in fact, that’s not why writers write, and it’s not why writers should write. If you write to get that external validation, then ultimately it’s going to feel quite hollow. Because at some point you’re going to have to come back to your desk and work on a new novel; you have the blank sheet of paper in front of you all over again.

Also, I saw around me how so many writers have got addicted to that cycle of: I have a good review and I’m on a real high, and now I have a really bad review I’m on the floor for three days. I saw how they measured their self-esteem based on how their books were received. I thought: that’s not how I want to live. I basically trained myself: I don’t have that much to do with the literary scene in London, I don’t go out that much to publishing parties, I just get on with what I do.

What I found with my first novel was that, no matter what anyone said about my book, I still had to come back the next day and do my own work. That didn’t change. The challenges that faced me as a writer were still exactly the same as they were before the good or bad review.

I have a lot of expectations when I start writing a novel, I really want to do something different with every novel I write, to do something that’s challenging for me. That’s where I face a lot of pressure, but once a book is done, that’s it: then my job is done and I don’t really worry about it. My publishers worry a lot. But they can’t really control it either. Whether people like the book or don’t like the book, it’s a subjective thing; it’s hard to control that. So why get stressed about it?

Who do you look to for feedback? Who do you really trust?

I have a couple of old friends who are very good readers of mine. Some of them are writers, some of them are not. But they’re the ones whose opinions I go to as a first call. After that, my agents and my editor. But they’re professional people, so they’re looking at the book from a slightly different angle. They’re looking at how to bring the book into the world. That’s already a different point of view. So I’m really careful not to show them anything unless I know what’s going on in the book.

Does it matter whether these friends and editors know the subject matter—in this case Shanghai—or is it better that they don’t?

I think it’s probably best that they don’t know the specifics of Shanghai to begin with, so that they can treat the book on its literary merit, and say whether it’s well written or not well written.

But then again, you get worried about it: it’s a book that’s set in Shanghai, which involves Shanghainese characters, and actually in this case involves a lot of Malaysian characters, so I was really nervous to see what people who lived in Shanghai would make of it. And so far, I’m really glad that a couple of people have said it really spoke to them.

Are people reluctant to share details of their lives with you, because you’re a writer?

No! People are always telling me stuff that they actually shouldn’t. They’re more open because they’re secretly hoping it’s going to work its way into your book.

So what happens now? You’ve got the book out. You’re back to teaching, back to that blank piece of paper the next day.

I would like to get to the blank piece of paper quite soon. But with the teaching and a publicity tour coming up soon, it’s quite distracting. I have to get back to the UK in March, and then to Shanghai and Australia, and then my American edition comes out in the summer. So all that is quite distracting.

How do you reconcile having to do all the publicity, when you could be writing?

I used to be quite conflicted in my view to publicity; I used to really hate it, but kind of feel that it was necessary, so I did it half-heartedly. Now I just think, it’s fine, it’s part of being a novelist in this day and age. My problem is that no one ever explained to me what was going to happen! I thought being a writer was just writing books and that’s it… I’ve learned to be OK at it, but I’m not a natural public speaker, for example. I don’t look forward to speaking in front of 500 people. It’s a source of mild stress for me.

Any disaster stories?

Yes! In Singapore, when my first novel came out, my publishers said “there’s so much interest, we’ve been selling so many copies, we’re going to organize a huge thing for you, at the National Library in Orchard Road.”

First of all, who goes to Orchard Road to go to the national library?! I didn’t know this, so they set up this thing. And there were at least 200 chairs laid out in front of a podium, but there was not one person. It was basically me, my publicist, and the guy who runs the Kinokuniya bookshop. So I was just sitting there reading to them, and they’ve already heard me reading about twelve times, and meanwhile the janitor kept stacking the chairs around me.

It’s better now, though?

Well by the time of the second book [Map of the Invisible World] I was quite well established. So they had me stand in Borders, it was like Meet the Author. And not a single person came! I didn’t sign a single book. So this time, I said “I’m not doing big bookshops. I’m just not doing it, don’t make me do it.” And they said,
“We really want you to do it.”

[Click here to see Aw’s schedule of public appearances in Singapore in the coming weeks.]

Do people respond differently to your work in different markets?

The UK responds very well, Australia too. Not so much the US. This one, they seem very interested in. But I think it’s that America doesn’t really care about Malaysia and South-East Asia, but they really care about China. That’s why they’re more interested in this book: “How can we be better than China? How do Chinese people think?”

So much of it depends on subject matter. The British have all these old fashioned links with Malaysia and Singapore, so I think it’s natural that they would be interested in my work. I think a lot of Indian writers say the same thing; they do very well in England and not so much in America.

We’re seeing more and more Chinese authors get international attention. Is there a South East Asian literary wave on the way?

There’s only, like, three of us anyway! The numbers just aren’t there. As far as I know, there really are only about three or four Malaysian writers that have been published internationally. So I think until greater numbers start coming through, we aren’t going to see that.

From your experience teaching here, do you think there are systemic problems that discourage literary talent?

Yeah, my sister was in school in Singapore for years, so I know the school system really well, and I’ve had a lot of Singaporean friends over the years. I think the Singaporean schooling system is not one that’s generally encouraging of creativity. But I think writing is a particular problem. Because the whole thing about writing requires you to question stuff in general. Not necessarily political things, but from a personal point of view. It needs you to question stuff that’s going on inside yourself. Very basic things, like family. That’s not something the Singaporean educational system encourages.

I can say this quite confidently because when I was growing up that was basically the system I grew up in. It was really hard to ask even the most basic questions about yourself and your family, like who am I, am I living in conditions that are happy? Those are not questions that people asked themselves.

Did you find that frustrating or was it only something that occurred to you when you left home?

I think personally I always found it frustrating. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had a sense of being a bit of an outsider. Maybe it’s because I was born in Taiwan, even though I moved back to Malaysia when I was two. Every time I have to fill in a form, my place of birth is Taiwan. When I go through immigration, they say, are you Taiwanese? That makes you feel different. So I have a slightly different perspective.

Perhaps the sort of students who are drawn to the arts are naturally more inquisitive?

Yes, that’s true. The students in my class have the potential but, for whatever reason, I feel they’re holding back. What I’m trying to do is get them to stop writing about zombies and dragons and start writing more about themselves. It’s easier to write about something that’s not yourself, that you don’t have to put yourself into.

These kids have very vivid and active imaginations. I’d just like that alertness to be pointed towards stuff that really matters to them. Because you can argue until you’re blue in the face, but you’re never going to convince me that dragons are the key to your existence, your being. The questioning doesn’t have to be in a provocative way, but it needs to be explored, in a way that’s meaningful. That’s personal.

Writing, particularly at the start of your career, has to involve things that are close to you and important to you. That’s what makes powerful literature. If you write about stuff that you don’t really care about, it’s never going to lead somewhere.

Though your own first novel wasn’t the obvious autobiographical one.

All my novels and particularly this one, draw a lot from my personal experiences. In the first one I wanted to get away from the very personal, because I just didn’t think my life was that interesting! I thought it was quite self-regarding to talk about myself.

But what I did do is talk about the experience of people who share my family background. So it really concerns a lot of stories that I heard when I was really young, about people in my grandfather’s generation; people who never had a voice. This was a part of Malaysia that people are never going to see, if it’s not captured in literature. So for me it was really important that these people had a voice and a presence in literature. From that point of view, it was quite a personal novel.

Are there common themes you think run through your work?

I haven’t thought about my first novel in a very long time. But thinking about it now, I’m interested in the way Asian people reinvent themselves. When you look at these tycoons, like the really rich ones, like Li Ka-Shing. Where does he come from? Where did he start from? There’s always a lot of myth making involved. Often, Asian people don’t celebrate their past in the way that Western people do. In the West, you’re exposed to a surfeit of information about where people are from.

I was always struck by how here, in South-East Asia, you grow up with all these famous figures. Like Mahathir, the former prime minister of Malaysia: you really don’t know who his father was. There is no way someone could be president of America without us knowing every single detail. And I’m really struck by how a lot of Asian cultures go in for this rewriting of their own narratives.

Whereas in places like Britain it’s important for people to talk about where they’re from. Asia’s the polar opposite.

And in China it’s super exaggerated. They really don’t care about what you were doing two years ago, let alone what your family did 100 years ago. I find that contrast interesting. I guess that’s what my books have in common with each other: they’re about how we deal with where we’re from.

So you’re not sitting down to tackle a theme. You just want to tell a story.

Every time I sit down to write a new novel, my only thought is to do something I haven’t done before. So I guess it’s interesting that there are some similarities.

Are you surprised that somewhere like Singapore hasn’t produced more literature about these very topics?

I talk about this a lot with my colleagues here and with other Singaporean writers. Singapore has everything it takes to produce a novel like that, because it has such high levels of education and literacy, and high disposable income. There should be more people reading and more people buying books and becoming writers, but they’re relatively low numbers.

But when you take the MRT, hardly anyone’s reading, they’re all playing games.

I noticed that. Even in London, they’ll be all reading. It always depresses me when I hear people in Singapore and Malaysia say “your books are so expensive.” It’s only $20, that’s not so expensive. People will happily spend $100 on dinner.

When I speak to old friends from school—and we’re all in good jobs now, we had a decent education—they’d say stuff like, “I haven’t read your second novel because Ronald still has it, and after Ronald he has to give it to...” It’s just 35 ringgit for a paperback! It’s just unbelievable. They feel no shame in saying to writers, “I haven’t bought your book because I’m waiting for the paperback because it’s less expensive.” Such a waste of money, someone told me last time.

And yet there’s such rich, recent, turbulent history to draw on. HBO Asia are currently shooting Serangoon Road, set amidst the intrigue of 1960s Singapore. So there are stories to tell.

What I’m finding with a lot of my students, even the Singaporean-Malay students, is that they have very little idea of what Malaysia is. Part of the Singapore narrative, at the governmental level, has involved erasing that part of the story. 1965 [the year in which the Malaysian parliament voted unanimously to expel Singapore from the Federation of Malaysia and Singapore became independent] was a very traumatic event for both sides, but particularly for Singapore.

But you can’t appreciate how significant the achievements of Singapore are, if they’re not measured against pre-1965 Malaysia. To appreciate fully what Singapore is and has become you have to see it as having, really recently, been part of Malaysia.

Are your students aware of the gaps in their knowledge?

When I was growing up, virtually every Singaporean I knew had family in Malaysia. And every other family in Malaysia had at least one relative working in Singapore. But now I have one Singaporean-Malay student who’s never even been to Malaysia. They don’t have that link. They’re not that interested. To them, Malaysia’s this slightly terrifying place, like Indonesia, where you can get robbed. You can only appreciate just how significant that sort of thinking is when you consider that Singapore was part of that country so recently.

One of my students put it quite succinctly. He doesn’t know. He knows that he doesn’t know. When he thinks about his cultural heritage it’s like an alien culture; he doesn’t feel a link to mainland China, there isn’t a link to Malaysia. So you don’t have the same sense of time and perspective.

And yet you still like it here in Singapore.

My liberal friends in London will say “Oh, there’s no press freedom in Singapore.” And I think, “OK, well I grew up with that, and there’s always ways you can work around it.”

But the reason I can’t be down on Singapore in a blanket way is that anyone who doesn’t like Singapore for those reasons—it’s boring or whatever—they basically have educated, middle class tastes, they need a certain kind of environment to get their kicks. But if you’re a working class Chinese from Malaysia, Singapore is nothing but 100% good. My uncles and aunts are small-town working Chinese. They think Singapore is absolutely wonderful. When you see it through their eyes, it’s a land of opportunity, of meritocracy, no corruption.. So the Singapore social experiment is a very valid one. But from a more profound point of view, from a writer’s point of view, I’m concerned that if the emotional timeline stops at ’65, then it’s going to take writers a lot longer to find their place in literature.

I think Singapore is very creative, with great film-makers and visual artists. Literature is the one thing that’s lagging behind. The Great Singapore Novel isn’t going to happen for a long time, because to have any novel, let alone a great one, you need to be able to draw upon reserves of experience. If you’re going to rely on that post-65 narrative, then Singapore is a young country. Somewhere like Britain has had hundreds of years.

Could it not come from the diaspora?

Maybe. I’ve heard that Boey Kim Cheng—who’s going to be at NTU next semester—has written a big novel. So that might be very good. He’s lived in Australia for many years; so that could work. But even to get a diaspora takes time. With a population of 4 or 5 million it’s not going to happen quickly. In the meantime, because Singapore is so success and results-driven, they want it now.

See Aw's schedule of public appearances in Singapore in April.

Tash Aw’s first novel The Harmony Silk Factory (2005) earned him a Booker nomination and a Whitbread win. He followed that with Map of the Invisible World (2009), and has just released his third book, Five Star Billionaire. Set in contemporary Shanghai, this latest work centers around five Malaysian expats chasing their dreams in the most exciting city on Earth.

Aw, born in Taiwan to Malaysian parents, moved to London in his teens and lived in Shanghai on and off during the writing of the book. Currently artist-in-residence at Singapore’s NTU, where he’s lecturing in creative writing, he spoke to Clara Lim and Ric Stockfis—at generous length—about how the story came together, what makes Shanghai so special, his career so far, and why Singaporeans ought to question things more.

This interview is in six parts:

1. On Five Star Billionaire and personal reinvention
2. On old and new China
3. On censorship and (not) being a spokesperson
4. On living in and writing about Shanghai
5. On the art of writing
6. On literary culture in Singapore

Click to view the interview on a single page. 

See Aw's schedule of public appearances in Singapore in April.

There’s a sense in which the intensely personal story of your relationship with Graham Greene stands-in for the kind of imagined, yet powerful, connection we all feel to certain authors, artists or musicians, but perhaps rarely articulate. What made you want to share your own story?

Exactly! I tried very hard to make this book not my story, but almost an archetypal tale of any one of us; thus, I don’t write about my actual father very much, but rather about that allegorical pattern we all know whereby we rebel against our parents, most of us, until we become them. We long to be anything other than our fathers—that’s the point of life, we think—and then we look into the mirror and hear our own voices and realize we’ve turned into our fathers. In much the same way, I begin the book with a dream-like scene in Bolivia and end it with a car-crash in the Andes not because those incidents are so interesting, but because I think most of our lives begin with a near-life experience, dream-like, and conclude with a near-death experience. And at the center of my book is a series of fires encircling my house. They really happened, but they also speak for that metaphorical sense of the mystics that all life is a burning house.

My sense is that every one of us has many people in our heads—artists, singers, writers, characters from history—and each corresponds to a different side of us. Some friends of mine can barely listen to Leonard Cohen, he seems so clearly to be reading their diaries and releasing their secrets to the world; others feel, when they pick up Virginia Woof, as if she’s voicing their most private thoughts, and knows them as even their closest friends do not.

So I was interested not so much in my story here, as in these larger presences, the story we all share, but often ignore: what are these people doing in our heads, and why might I feel so haunted by Graham Greene, and not by writers I know better or love more? What does it say about my parents that I take Greene to be a kind of adopted father, an alternative parent, and why will we accept correspondences with strangers we’ve never met and run from them with our own mother and father? What can the unconscious tell us that the conscious mind would never disclose?

I suppose it’s ultimately the great promise of writing, and all art: if a writer goes deep enough into himself, it feels as if he’s reading your secrets and shadows as much as his own. And you come to know his sins, guilts and passions as you might never know those of even your siblings or parents. I really wanted to use myself as a test case, a kind of lab rat, for this syndrome, since a part of me felt we’re defined as much by our shadows as by our resumes, as much by the ghosts we carry around with us, as by the lives.

You’ve written about how inner journeys are the hardest and most revealing. And also that the habit of—if not the capacity for—reflection is being lost, even frowned upon in the world at large. What is it do you think that’s so important about self-reflection and what has it brought to your own life?

I love as much as anyone could the speed and stimulation and all-over-the-place diversity of the modern world; but I find I can only make sense of it by stepping out of it and sitting still, putting it into perspective. I’m thrilled that we all have ever more ways to communicate, travel and learn, but they only make sense if quantity doesn’t override quality. Experience is only as rich as the understanding that comes out of it.

So although I love movement, I feel it’s only as useful as the stillness that lies around it: I’ll race around Singapore, say, for three days, and then I need to go back to the quiet of my desk in Japan and be quiet in order to understand what I’ve seen and learned. I’ll take in a blast of images, experiences, stimulations, people when I visit New York and then go to a monastery to see the other side of life and to place it within a larger picture. When I was in my twenties and leading the life of my dreams as a writer for Time magazine in Midtown Manhattan, I felt I was doing justice to only one part of life, and left that dizzily exhilarating life for a temple in Kyoto, which I hoped would teach me about the other side of the equation and round out my imperfect education.

My suspicion is that the more speed we have in our lives—and it’s almost post-human now—the more something in us will cry out for slowness; the more movement we have, the more we’ll find a need for a compensating stillness. With a teenager in California handling 300,000 texts in a month, the average American spending eight-and-a-half hours every day before a screen and Internet rescue camps springing up to help the addicted, we seem to be living ever further from clarity, focus and therefore direction, almost as if we’re caught up in an accelerating roller-coaster that we never quite asked to get on and don’t know how to get off.

In the end, we need two things to lead a balanced life—a sense of the world and a sense of ourselves; it’s like breathing in and breathing out. And if you can only get to know the world by stepping out, and losing yourself in experience, you can only get to know the self by stepping back, and finding yourself in contemplation. One without the other leads to a kind of madness.

I worry that we’ll lose spaciousness, intimacy and soul if we don’t take conscious measures to unplug now and then, and make a space in our lives outside our cellphones, laptops and diversions. In the end, we’ll be sustained only by wisdom, not information, and only by inner, not external, resources. The person racing from one text to the next, from one attraction and screen and excitement to the next, finally gets lost in the flood, and swept out to sea like a fisherman in a tsunami.

For many people, yours must seem like something of a dream job: to travel where you choose and write about what you want. But what were the choices you made along the way to bring this about; were they difficult; and do you think you may have missed out on anything as a result of the transient life?

I suppose I chose freedom over belonging, concentration over ease and, to go back to the last question, inner riches over external one. These choices weren’t difficult—by my late twenties, I could see what values most deeply sustained me and what graces would never be mine—and I never regret them, but they speak to my own peculiarities, and I wouldn’t wish them on anyone else!

So, at 55 now, the age when many of my friends are retiring, I can afford to live only in a tiny, two-room rented apartment in rural Japan—as when I was a student—and I have to hustle every day for new jobs and assignments; if I were to fall ill for a month, the amount of money coming in (to help me support my 81-year-old mother, my wife and my two kids) would be exactly $0. I have to work every day of the year, including Christmas and New Year’s and my birthday, and, as soon as I’ve finished one article—I often write five to ten a week–have to turn to the next. I get no pension, I receive no health insurance and the money I get from writing a book, which may take five years of consuming work, is the same as I’d get from a few days of lectures (though, by the same token, of course, it’s infinitely more rewarding).

I’ve also found, as many of us do, that I’m a much tougher boss than any external boss would be, and to some extent, working from home, I’m never away from the office. Working in the Time magazine head offices in New York, on at least two nights a week I and my colleagues would all be there till 4am, before coming in the next day at around 9:00; yet working alone is infinitely more demanding.

I do think I’m lucky to have seen that I’d prefer a life of unsettledness to one of security, and to have been able to pursue it; I did have to give up a sense of guaranteed ease and stability and external support to pursue writing on my own (all of the above applies to any kind of writing, I think, not just writing about travel). Now, just as my friends are beginning to enjoy well-earned holidays for the rest of their lives, I’m realizing I’ll have to keep on cranking out articles in my eighties, if I last that long, and in an age when newspapers and magazines and books are all vying to be the next Titanic!

But I never regret these choices. As my wife would no doubt attest, I decided early on that I got more satisfaction from making a life than from making a living, and would be happy to work three times as hard, if, in return, I could make my own schedule and follow my own itinerary. Luck comes not in one’s circumstances, but in what one brings to them. Luck, I think Marcus Aurelius says, is “the good fortune you determine for yourself.”

Still, when I was a little boy, I dreamed sometimes of being able to live in some remote part of Japan and get to write. And here I am. It’s funny how we sometimes don’t notice how our dreams have come true, because once we’re living them, they don’t seem dreams any more, but realities we almost take for granted.

Can you share anything about how you write? If you’re truly at home in the airport departure lounge, can you write from there as well as anywhere?

No! I need absolute stillness to write, a great distance from the world and weeks and weeks on end of undistracted time. Indeed, probably no one is fussier about how he writes; I have friends who can scribble off things on planes, or in airport lounges, or at writers’ festivals, and I am hugely admiring and envious. I can’t write anything for at least seven days after getting off a plane.

Of course I could write something quick and fleeting and maybe funny in an airport departure lounge, drawing from the madness that’s unspooling around me; and when I’m really concentrating, I can write something more substantial even on a plane. But for me it’s very hard to find soul and spaciousness and real intimacy or quiet in such places. That’s why I choose to live—and to spend nearly all my life—in the middle of rural Japan, with no car or bicycle or newspapers or high-speed Internet or television I can understand.

I do feel just at much at home amidst the crowds of Terminal 1 of Changi, but that belongs to the part of my life that needs experience, stimulation, challenge and shock. To write about it all, I prefer to be in the midst of silence and months of stillness.

So I spend most of my life awakening at dawn, writing for five hours (by hand) at a child’s desk I inherited from my daughter, lavishly appointed with pictures of Hello Kitty and Brad Pitt, taking a walk around the neighborhood, reading a little, taking care of e-mails, playing ping-pong and then going to sleep by perhaps 8:30 or 9am.

Revisiting a place, and one’s younger self, is an especially powerful form of travel. In what ways does Asia—in a manner of speaking, the place where you first made your name—still retain the power to surprise or excite you?

Excitement, for me, lies in the eye of the beholder, and a place is only boring if the eye that’s brought to it is bored. To me Asia is endlessly exciting, not least because it’s constantly in motion (more than anywhere on the planet). When I return to Shanghai after only four years away, I can barely orient myself; it has altered on its surface so dramatically. Whatever I wrote about Singapore fifteen years ago would have to be modified now, and when I look around me in Japan, I respond very differently than I did when I arrived, if only becauseI am 25 years older now, and look for different things.

That said, though, I’ve always felt that places are very much like people: they may put on or lose weight, change their clothes and passions, go through different phases and moods, and yet the gleam in the eye of an 82-year-old woman is the same one would have seen when she was an eight-year-old girl. Singapore, for example, looks and feels radically different than it did fifty years ago; but if you walk around it at 3am—as I used to do when jet-lagged—you can find more and more of the cracks in the surface, the flickers in the subconscious that you’d have seen then. Whatever I found in the city when I used to stay there, in a seedy, broken-down hotel off Orchard Road in 1984, is still somewhere to be found, if only in repressed memory or intimation or half-stifled longing.

The first joy of my life in Asia has been to see so much of the continent, from Bangkok to Beijing, transform itself; the second has been to see how much of it, beneath those external changes, remains the same. It’s that blend of change and changelessness that itself becomes a source of fascination and surprise (India, for example, seems to me just as incorrigible and uncontrollable as it ever was, even in the midst of its new malls and McDonald’s outlets).

Since we can’t talk about foreign writing on Asia without mentioning Somerset Maugham… what do you think he would make of how Singapore and Malaysia have changed since his time?

The great writers are great because they catch the future as much as the past. And to me Maugham is as relevant today as he was in 1929 because he caught the outline of patterns that never really change. Go to parts of Singapore today and I’m sure you’ll see a Western stockbroker who’s thrown over his life of ease at home to live in a more exotic and open place, perhaps with a young local girl he just met at Clarke Quay; and you’ll see the memsahibs at the club clucking over that choice, and a priest in the countryside who’s found himself more converted by the people he’s trying to convert than otherwise, and some bedraggled backpacker who’s left his trustfund at home in Chicago to try to find the truth of reality and himself in the Himalayas.

That’s how and why Maugham still casts such a huge influence—over V.S. Naipaul (who has been writing on him since the age of 16), over Paul Theroux (whose Hotel Honolulu is like updated Maugham, with sex and psychology added), over Jan Morris (who travels with Maugham’s rare blend of amusement and acuity); it’s also why Hollywood continues to make movies out of even his obscurest stories, most recently in The Painted Veil, Being Julia and Up at the Villa.

I recently put together a whole anthology of Maugham’s writings on travel, in part because I believe he catches Southeast Asia as well as anyone in the past 100 years has done. He was the rare soul who seemed able to see through everything and yet to be open to anything; who could get into the hearts and minds of woman and man, establishment character and runaway, Confucian and skeptic. I still think—to cite just one example—that he offers the best summary of Buddhism I’ve ever read, in his great 1920s Asian travel book, The Gentleman in the Parlour, before adding, in the last sentence, that he believes every sentence of it, but can’t begin to be a Buddhist himself.

Maugham had the gift of being Janus-faced, and no aspect of life was closed to him. Put him in the Marina Bay tomorrow, and he’d be in the cocktail lounge listening to the lies a Goldman Sachs trader was telling himself as he leaned in closer to a girl from the Philippines, while noticing how the man’s wife was emerging from the elevators, disheveled, with a chic local boy in tow.

With the exotic ever more accessible, are the days of the great Western travel writer—the Thubrons, the Morrises—over? Or, to be more positive, how do you think travel writing might evolve in the coming years?

I would say that the great Western travel writer continues to flourish, if only because British boarding-schools still train their inmates (and I was one) in living off inedible food, in very difficult circumstances, and treating everyday life as if it were wartime. A cave in Afghanistan is not going to be either foreign or strange if you went to Eton (as did Thubron, Rory Stewart, Wilfred Thesiger, Peter Fleming and so many others).

So if you were looking for accounts of India today, you might well turn to William Dalrymple or Patrick French, both of whom write very much in that old British vein—imperturbable, learned, resilient and tough-minded. If you want to follow China, you can hardly do better than read the youngish American (and Peace Corps veteran) Peter Hessler. Many follow Afghanistan through the works of Rory Stewart, and Iran through Christopher de Bellaigue. In their circumstances, their prose styles and their attitudes, many of these belong to the classic tradition, so brilliantly exemplified by Jan Morris and Colin Thubron (two of my heroes, as it happens).

But you’re absolutely right that the whole scene has diversified, too, and that part of the joy of contemporary travel writing is that more and more of it is being written by women, by those native to the cultures of Asia, say, by people not the manner born. Travel writing has grown democratic and diverse and as multi-cultural as the places being written about.

So if you want to understand Japan through foreign eyes, turn to women writers. I’d usually suggest Liza Dalby, Angela Carter, Leila Philip and Diane Durston. Some of the memorable travel books about modern India are written by modern Indians—most notably Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta. A great book about Singapore today might be written not just by a latter-day Maugham, but, perhaps, by a young woman who’s half Thai and half Dutch, and grew up in L.A., and yet finds in the city an interesting confluence of many of her different homes.

Travel writing has had to grow more inward and more personal now that more and more of the world can be caught so quickly and powerfully on camera and be seen online; so even as the Thubrons and Morrises of future generations will no doubt flourish, they’ll be joined by mongrel souls looking at an ever more mongrel world.

Pico Iyer is appearing at the Singapore Writers Festival for three separate sessions on November 10. Meet the Author (2.30pm) and Getting Lost; Getting Inspired (4pm) are both covered by a Festival Pass ($15). The Eat Your Words session (7.30pm) has already sold out. The Festival itself runs November 2-11.
 

Call it social travel, short-term letting, peer-to-peer holidaying or just the new, new thing, sites like Airbnb and Roomorama appear to have reached something of a tipping point; worldwide bookings through the former alone are set to exceed those at Hilton Hotels (some 600,000) this year. Renting a property instead of a hotel room when you travel abroad is nothing new; but these sites, which connect hosts with spare rooms, empty apartments, tents and even castles to guests looking for something a little different on their next trip, have revolutionized the market. Gone are the cumbersome classified ads, the exorbitant agency fees and the need to book a year in advance. Gone, too, is the hype surrounding their scuzzy progenitors, Craigslist and Couchsurfing**—both we and the Web have grown up in the last few years. Now you really can do this kind of thing not only on a whim and on a budget but in real style.

**Top of Google’s ‘related searches’ for “couchsurfing”: “couchsurfing bad experience.” Then “couchsurfing horror stories.” That’s one reason why the next gen sites have placed such a premium on identity verification.

From Door to Door

These sites, though, have themselves already been around a couple of years; so what’s new, and what difference does that make here in Singapore? Well, for one thing, there’s now a vast inventory in Asia, especially on the two sites already namechecked, meaning you can find awesome options almost anywhere you want to go. For another, many of them have big plans for the local market and, in several cases, know it pretty well already. Both industry poster boy Airbnb and the previously Euro-focused 9flats (whose VP, Wei Leen Ng, is an NUS alumni) say they’re opening offices in Singapore before year-end, to better service those of us on this side of the world. Roomorama founders Federico Folcia and Jia En Teo (also a Singaporean) are one step ahead of them, having relocated their headquarters from NYC last year to focus on operations here. Despite widely voiced concerns that Asians might not be quite so comfortable in throwing open their doors to strangers, they’re all confident this is only the beginning.

The space is evolving, too. Indeed, the notion that this is all about sketchy spare rooms has gone out the (grubby-paned) window. Roomorama, in particular, focuses on premium properties, including villas and even serviced apartments; 90% of their inventory is private and not all of it comes cheap (Teo tells us they recently had a single booking to the value of US$17,000). Airbnb, meanwhile, curate their vast collection so that instead of looking at a bunk bed, you can look at villas near vineyards, or only apartments featuring original design works by the Eames brothers (seriously—they have 53 of those). Sure, you can still find some less-than-stellar studios, but this is all a far cry from what sites like this were first known for. Indeed, those that haven’t seen fit to filter or finesse, including unabashed Airbnb clone Wimdu, look horribly out of step.

The Paradox of Choice

Where to start, though, when there are so many of these sites out there? The overwhelming number of sites can undoubtedly be a turn-off, especially when the concept of renting peer-to-peer is still new to so many. But it’s a problem that is, for the most part, disappearing; another reason why now’s such a good time to start thinking seriously about this kind of holiday, if you haven’t already.

The biggest players in the market are buying or tying up with the (reputable) competition—earlier this year Roomorama merged with European site Lofty, while Airbnb acquired the UK’s Crashpadder (the names of the two being pretty indicative of the different markets they’re going after)—meaning it’s less and less intimating when you start doing your research. There are other big players, such as the somewhat more traditional and whole lot less sexy HomeAway, which lists more than 300,000 properties, but there’s a reason we keep mentioning the other two; if you’ve an eye for design, money to spare but not to burn and an interest in offbeat and plain awesome places, then you don’t really need to look beyond them; particularly if you’re holidaying around Asia. (See Battle of the Bedrooms for a comparison of the key differences between the biggest players.)

In any case, this being the Web, there are various aggregator tools that make browsing inventory from several sites simultaneously a breeze, and curators (so 2012, darling) choosing their favorites. Late last year, Tripping launched a Kayak-style discovery engine for some 500,000+ listings on sites like Roomorama, 9flats and HomeAway; though not Airbnb. Rentmix, is a map mashup created by an ex-Google engineer that plots all the different properties for super-intuitive viewing. And the likes of WelcomeBeyond, which acts like a Mr and Mrs Smith for the rental market by handpicking properties, are a great alternative if you prefer someone else doing your gem hunting for you; though, frankly, where’s the fun in that? (They currently have only one property listed in all of SE Asia, anyway.)

Booking is getting easier, too. In April, Airbnb launched Match, a slick booking process that automates the process of messaging hosts so that guests can find the kind of property they’re looking for quicker and at the last minute; and they already have their own app. Roomorama’s ShoutOuts post messages to the whole community for faster response times, their merger with Lofty was driven in part by a desire to use their back-end to implement truly instant booking (one area the industry’s still playing catch-up with hotels) and they have an app of their own launching in the next couple of months (along with Thai and Bahasa versions of the site). User feedback—a key driver of this space from the beginning—is getting more sophisticated as the mere novelty of staying in someone else’s apartment wears off, meaning more confidence when booking. Security, specifically lack of comeback for both hosts and guests, dominated the headlines for sites like these last year, when an unlucky host had her house trashed in what became known as “the Airbnb incident”; but that triggered a wave of improvements and assurances and now 9flats, for example, trumpet their host protection plan, which runs to €900,000, as their biggest selling point and assures guests that they meet all hosts face-to-face.

Ultimately, of course, you get what you pay for—you can’t run to Reception like you can at the Ritz-Carlton, but if that’s what you expect then you’re on the wrong webpage.

5 Ways to a Pain-free Vacation Rental Experience

Long-term Lease on Life

What with all this hype and all these clones, you’d be forgiven for thinking this carries more than a whiff of Groupon about it (remember them? Check your junk folder if not). But the speed with which the market leaders have evolved (even hotels are now looking to get their suites listed) and the fact that the model is so eminently scalable (you have a room? You can make money!) suggests the travel industry’s old way of doing things really has been overturned for good.

It’s a safe bet that the space is set to grow a whole lot more, especially here, where we’re still at the surface-scratching stage. And if there are bumps ahead, they’re more likely to be regulatory than because people are bored of the concept; city councils around the world have queried the legality of tenants subletting their apartments for short-term stays, and in some cases, changed the law to prohibit it, but none of the sites has found (or necessarily tried to find) a way to police all their listings. In Singapore, the rule seems to be that you can only sublet for six months or more, though there’s some confusion about which properties that applies to.

So, while Airbnb’s revelation that hosts in NYC are now making US$21,000 a year on average might be rather envy-inducing, it’s where you can go, not how much can make, that’s truly exciting about all this. Don’t believe it? Maybe it’s time you took a look for yourself.

Battle of the Bedrooms

Not all peer-to-peer rental sites are exactly alike. While aggregators can help you navigate by location, going direct to the sites offers a greater degree of functionality. Here’s how the big players measure up, so you don’t waste your time looking in the wrong place.

 See also:

Luxurious Home Rentals around Asia
Asia's Best Villa Rental Agencies
Quirky Ideas for Budget Travel
What Readers Think About Vacation Rental Sites
 

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun. Which is why we set ourselves the task of identifying 20 or more hot new trends that are likely to be the talk of the town over the next few months.

We’re not claiming to be the first to talk about any of these—in more than a few cases they’re already huge elsewhere—or that they’re all things to approve of. What we’ve tried to do instead is identify the topics and trends that we think are about to blow up here in Singapore; and, where possible, clue you in on how to sample or learn more about them for yourself. At the very least, they’re all things you’re going to want an opinion on in the coming year. So read on and enjoy getting one over at least some of your friends.

1. Pisco
Move over whisky, pisco is the new word on everyone’s lips. Judging by the Peruvian Embassy’s promotional showcase at the Mandarin Orchard last month, grape brandy could well be the It Drink of 2012. Order up some Pisco sours (mixed with lime, simple syrup and egg white) to wash down Latin grub like ceviche, salt cod fritters and fish tacos. You can already find it at Bedrock Bar & Grill, Brewerkz and City Space; but expect to see it appear on more menus in the coming months. It’s not just their drinks, either. Ferran Adria, in Lima recently to make a documentary about Peruvian food, said of the country’s current gastronomic boom, “there is no other country experiencing something like this.” 

2. Pinterest
Or at least other digital content curation and visual bookmarking sites like it. If you haven’t already heard of two-year-old Pinterest, it’s a site that lets you seamlessly share visual items you find online with your followers. Think of it like Facebook, but driven by beautiful images, not mindless status updates (small wonder some 97% of its fans on—yes—Facebook are women). Here’s what else is interesting: The number of visitors went up by close to 430% in the last four months of 2011; it hit 10 million users faster than any independent site in history (at least by one interpretation—they were in beta for quite a while); it generates more referral traffic to other sites than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined; and, as of last month, even Zuckerberg has a profile.

Perhaps most tellingly, Pinterest taps into increasing cycnicism about the sharing of personal data online. In light of the recent privacy scandal, in which it was discovered (thanks to a Singaporean!) that apps including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare and Path were uploading users’ contact databases without explicit permission, the social media landscape may be about to change. Pinterest has never been about sharing personal information, just cool stuff you’ve seen, and that bodes extremely well for its future.

3. iPad 3
What to say? It’ll be huge. Even if you wish it weren’t.

4. Myanmar
No surprises here, but the astonishing, almost-overnight transformation of Myanmar from repressive regime to come-one-come-all destination, makes it the world’s hottest ticket right now. The only problem? A lack of infrastructure. SilkAir, Jetstar and Myanmar Airways all fly to Yangon direct from Singapore, but, deprived of trade and much tourism for so long, there simply aren’t enough high-end hotels to go round and the big chains are chomping at the bit to get in. For now, booking early is essential. As for what to do there once you’ve ticked the big-hitters (Yangon, Bagan, Inle Lake) off the list? Lucy Jackson, co-director of luxury travel operator Lightfoot Travel, recommends “hopping on a luxury river boat with a Southern Myanmar Cruise to meander through the magnificent Myeik Archipelago.”

And where next? Simon Westcott, Managing Director for Mr & Mrs Smith Asia Pacific tips Sri Lanka (“back on the traveler map after years of civil war”), Tasmania (“fast gaining a rep for modern art, local produce and pristine nature”) and Fiji’s offshore islands (“where boutique retreats are a far cry from mass tourism on the main island”).

5. Sustainable Seafood
If marine life experts at last month’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies forum are to be believed, the verdict is still out on whether forgoing sharks fin will save the predatory fish. Still, the days of unscrupulous sushi-bingeing and all-you-can-eat buffets are over. Customers today demand to know where their food comes from—and it better be from a responsible, eco-conscious source. Restaurants are doing their duty securing fresh catch from certified fisheries, and hotels like the Shangri-La, Swissôtel and Fairmont have banned shark’s fin outright. Foie gras, you should be shivering in your pants. (Check out the foodie trends that are already old elsewhere but not yet big in Singapore.)

6. Shorter Workouts
What’s not to like? Scientists in Ontario recently released the results of a study on super-short interval training, and the good news is that a strenuous 20-minute session produces the same physiological changes as a much longer workout. That’s not a complete surprise; high-intensity interval training (HIIT) was shown several years ago to do the trick, but HIIT requires you to exercise at 100% of your maximum heart rate (MHR), and that’s a little scary for some. What this latest study shows is that, in fact, a 20-minute session of minute-on, minute-off intervals at just 90% of your MHR (deduct your age from 220) delivers significant improvements to your fitness.

John J Sweeney, Fitness Development Director of new spot Celebrity Fitness reckons this is primed for the big-time: “People want shorter, fun workouts and these classes are becoming increasingly popular. In the US, there’s a shift towards group fitness classes that are in 30-minute formats, and more experts are advising 20-minute strength training sessions.” Hooray to that.

Also big in the world of fitness elsewhere: Cheap gyms. In the UK, chains like easyGym and Fit4Less have recently scored big wins against the more established chains by offering memberships from as little as £10 ($20) a month. It’s probably just wishful thinking that it might happen here, though.

7. Incentivized sharing
Forget daily deal sites. The future is discounts and giveaways in exchange for sharing content online. The stats don’t lie: Close to 60% of social media users say being offered a discount or deal would make them post about a product or service. Combine that with social search (the weighting that the likes of Google+ increasingly give to posts from within your network of followers) and a model emerges in which the likes of Groupon are no longer needed.

8. Hair Chalk
Hair what? Thanks to sites like Pinterest, nano-trends are spreading faster than ever. The latest, according to celebrity hair and makeup artist Andrea Claire, is hair temporarily colored with artist chalk that washes out the next day. Bad news for blondes, though: it can stain for up to a week.

9. Mary Katrantzou for Topshop
Top-drawer designers collaborating with high-street labels is no longer news. But, boy, do people still get excited. This year’s hot tip is a toss-up between the Marni for H&M collection, and the 10-piece collection for Topshop from the Greek designer beloved of Anna Dello Russo, Alexa Chung and Keira Knightley. Marie Choo, director of Alchemy Consultancy is plumping for the latter: " She’s one of the hottest designers of the moment. Her main collection costs upward of thousands of dollars but with Topshop, it will be more accessible, and feature her trademark vibrant and opulent prints, as well as intricate detailing and structures, including her signature porcelain bowl-inspired skirted dresses.” Get in line, ladies: The collection launches March 10.

Katrantzou isn’t the only emerging star to watch, mind you. Tracy Phillips, Director of Present Purpose, reckons this is the year when former “next gen designers” will enter the mainstream. “You could already see the shift during the recent big fashion weeks in NYC and London,” she says. “It's names like Katrantzou, Simone Rocha and Prabal Gurung, unheard of just four short years ago, that are causing the bulk of the excitement. A lot of this has to do with these young designer collaborations with high street labels and B2C businesses like Moda Operandi, which helps bring cutting edge design to a much broader audience.”

10. Mobile Visual Search
Those funny squares of code you see on billboards and throughout magazines (like ours)? They’re Quick Release (or QR) Codes and if you scan them with a special app you’ll be taken directly to a website—you’ll hear people say they’re the future. The good news if you haven’t already got your head around them? Their days are probably numbered and they’re about to be replaced with Mobile Visual Search (MVS), a new kind of augmented reality.

Shoot a picture of something you like with your phone’s camera (no more hunting around for the scanning app) and you’ll have instant access to product and company info, perhaps even the option to buy something there and then. Instead of puzzling over squiggles of black and white code, you’re interacting directly with what you see; something that comes much more naturally to all of us.

It’s more versatile (it can even work in 3D), less vulnerable to malicious coding and, let’s face it, a whole lot cooler. You may have already come across it: Cold Storage experimented with virtual stores at Bugis and Boon Lay MRT stations late last year. And it’s only going to get bigger. Bye, bye, QR.

11. Black-Brewed Coffee
Still think espresso is the last word when it comes to good joe? Think again. Slowly and surely the world is waking up to alternative brewing methods (and moving away from milk). Too often these techniques—think syphon, filtration and cold drip—are novelty add-ons to a coffee joint’s repertoire; but Harry Grover of 40 Hands reckons “knowledge is growing and black-brewed coffees are becoming more accepted.” He points out that the Australian Barista Academy now runs alternate brewing courses (“When I did my barista training, you just learnt to perfect the art of espresso”) and that, when it comes to specialty grade beans, “their subtle aromatics and complex flavors are lost in trying to strip them out in 30 seconds of hot water, so brewed methods are the way to go.” Small wonder Grover’s curated-coffee menu at bistro Open Door Policy is labelled “The Black Stuff.”

12. Jeremy Lin
It’s been barely six weeks since the 23-year-old NBA star emerged from semi-obscurity to lead his New York Knicks to victory over the neighboring Nets, outscore Kobe Bryant in a win over the Lakers, beat the Raptors with less than a second on the clock, and have other NBA stars queuing up to declare him the next Steve Nash. Six weeks since the world was overcome with Linsanity. The reason for all the fuss? His mad skills, of course, though you first have to look past: (a) His being Taiwanese-American and thus standing in for every Asian who was ever told they couldn’t play ball; (b) the fact that he’s only 6’3”, proving you don’t have to be a freak like Yao to make it; and (c) that he’s a devout Christian, meaning the US press can talk about someone other than Tim Tebow. Expect insane levels of attention, expectation and, yes, thinly-veiled racist stereotypes to be heaped on young J-Lin this year. If the last few weeks are anything to go by, it’s Lin for the Win.

13. Instagram vs. Hipstamatic
These two leading camera apps are engaged in an epic battle of musical chairs. First, Hipstamatic excited hipsters everywhere and won the iPhone App of the Year award in 2010, but Instagram quickly followed suit and claimed the prize (and 15 million users) in 2011. But now that Hipstamatic has introduced their new “Disposable Series” or D-Series (one person shares a “roll” of Hipstamatic film with others, everyone takes turns snapping away, and no one gets to see the results until the whole film gets used up), and with Instamatic yet to roll out to Android and Windows, expect this to be a fight that just keeps on giving.

14. Multilingual Music Spots
What with the launch of Timbre’s new bilingual spot Switch at the end of last month; late-last-year Mandopop arrival Shuffle; neighboring newbie COCO; and the recent redirection of live music space TAB toward Korean, Thai and Chinese music as opposed to purely local talent, we clearly have a trend we can call our own. Whether that’s something to be proud of is another matter entirely.

15. Australian Drops
Courtesy of Robert Rees of Wine Exchange Asia, a tip for all of you tired of paying through the nose for good wine: “Thanks to the deflation of the Australian wine investment bubble here in Singapore, prices for a large range of top-end Australian wines will continue to be depressed and constitute amazingly good value drinking for the well-researched online internet shopper. Prices for these wines will become the cheapest in the world right here in Singapore because of the extent of the over-supply.” Amen to that.

As for what else 2012 has in store, based on the hype it’s been getting Stateside, we also think you’ll be hearing a lot more about sweet, affordable wines like moscato.

16. Social Running
Here’s a fun game: Stick the word “social” in front of another random word (gardening? shouting? firewalking?) and chances are you’ve predicted the next big trend. Running is no different. Local artist/sneaker customizer Mark Ong raves about Purple Lights runs. “They’re more like social gatherings where we run and catch up. Instead of hitting the bars after work, we run. It’s attractive because there is no athletic objective but fitness happens to be a byproduct.” Meanwhile, if social drinking is more your scene, then check out new local startup Bartop, which gathers together “awesome people at awesome bars.” It’s worth a quick reality check here—running (and certainly drinking) with others is hardly new. What is new is the ability to organize impromptu get-togethers with like-minded strangers on the fly. It’s the social networking that makes the magic happen. And there’s still room in the market for social sleeping, folks.

17. Crowd-sourced Travel Tips
Ric Shreves of local startup Gottagetaway thinks “travel websites simply stopped improving a few years back. It’s like the industry collectively decided that things were “good enough” and stopped investing in innovation.” He’s not the only one to think that way: giant travel portals and hotel websites are fast falling out of favor with consumers and there’s growing distrust of unreliable reviews on the likes of TripAdvisor. Step forward social networks.

Reading your friends’ recommendations and, crucially, seeing their holiday snaps, can tell you far more about whether theirs is a trip you’d enjoy yourself. Says Lucy Jackson of Lightfoot Travel, “We are seeing a trend in referrals via friends and community circles pointing them towards similar experiences. Facebook is a powerful medium for incentivizing people to book a holiday to the same destination after asking “where is that?!” when they come across an album of gorgeous scenery.”

And it’s by no means just Facebook; sites and apps like Pinterest and Instagram are fast becoming the first port of call for anyone daydreaming of a break, while others are springing up specifically to facilitate social sharing of travel tips: Trippy, Tripped Off, Tripl, Gogobot, and Afar, to name but a few. It’s surely a mini-bubble, but then, as Simon Mayle, Marketing Manager of ILTM Asia points out, “The 25-44 year old high-end consumer now visits an average of 20 websites during the research phase of the trip planning process.” 

18. Books that Talk Back
Get ready for geolocation in your e-books. Publishers are rapidly stepping up their interactive offerings and the most interesting development looks set to be books that help you find your way. And we’re not talking about the A-Z, or cheesy self-help, but rather the ability to click on a building’s link in a travel guide and be shown instantly how to get there. Local publisher Phil Tatham of Monsoon Books predicts even more avant-garde uses of such functionality, in which a work of fiction “might weave the reader’s current location—country, street, nearby landmarks—into the story itself”. As for e-book lovers ruing the local lack of access to the likes of the Kindle Store and Apple iBookstore, 2012 should also see the establishment of several more local e-bookstores to rival SingTel’s Skoob.

19. (Even) Better Beer
The craft beer movement here looks in rude health. Last month saw the launch of bold new flavors from both Archipelago, with their 40 Hands tie-up, a coffee schwarzbier called ARCHIpresso, and Brewerkz, who introduced a chocolate porter. Expect to see plenty more in the coming months with Archipelago in particular now championing “collaboration” as much as “innovation”. Similarly encouraging is the launch (scheduled for March 15) of a Beer Trail from the folks behind the Disloyalty Coffee Card, covering venues like Jibiru, Old Empire and newbie Heart of House.

20. CrossCore180
Forget TRX (those odd-looking yellow-and-black cables you avoid in the gym), the CrossCore180 is the latest mouthful-of-a-word in bodyweight training equipment—at least until the next one comes along. Nikhil Abraham of Phyzique, who runs bootcamps using this new machine (it launched in the US just six months ago), reckons the hype is justified. “It’s different from the other suspension trainers,” he explains, “because it allows rotation, which is essential to human movement. There are countless exercises you can do on it to work the whole body—and it can be used as a cable machine when we add dumbbells, a kettlebell or super bands to it.”

21. Barrel-aged Cocktails
Now that cocktail culture is firmly established here, it’s only a matter of time before everyone starts talking about barrel-aged drinks. Nothing will ever replace bespoke tipples but those tired of finicky, eight-ingredient drinks will appreciate barrel-aged varieties. Already a hit in New York, the pre-mixed libations are stored in wooden casks to develop a more intense, fuller flavor. “It cuts down multiple steps in the process of the drink making,” says Raveen Misra of Néktar, “which works out great for the end consumer and the mixologist because it saves time.” Misra himself has been doing bottle-ageing for a while and is introducing wood into the mix, though not in barrels as “untreated French oak wood is a real bitch to find!” You can however find limited quantities of barrel-aged cocktails at 28 HongKong Street. Misra also thinks this year will see a greater emphasis on R&D kitchens to develop secret recipes, as well as master classes with foreign cocktail stars, like Marian Beke, head bartender of London’s The Nightjar, who dropped by Nektar last month. Also look out for one-off partnerships like the Tippling Club’s Juniper Sling ($23), a quaffable form of its namesake Penhaligon’s fragrance.

22. The Next Lana Del Rey
Hard to believe we're already looking for one. But that's how fast the music blogosphere moves. (Although, when we spoke to Universal Music, they tried to tip LDR, despite the fact that it's been a full nine months since "Video Games" was released.) We're putting our money on Chicago brother-sister duo Natalie and Elliot Bergman, who record as Wild Belle and whose January debut single "Keep You" blends synth-pop, reggae and horns to magical effect.

How trendy is Singapore? Find out in our interview with Henry Mason, head analyst at Trendwatching.com.