I’m at Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat restaurant. My friend’s eyes are rolling to the back of her head. “Oh my COD.” She squeals before we fall into a fit of giggles for no reason other than her highball-induced mispronunciation. We’re having an absolute blast but it’s already 8pm and the main course has only just begun.
“I think we might have to skip dessert if I’m going to be out of here by nine,” I state as she takes another mouthful of her orgasmic blackened cod. She chews it slowly before responding.
“Ok, sounds good. I’ll get a mochi to go”.
We stumble out onto Grosvenor Square.
“Sorry again for being so late, James. I’ll leave earlier for you next month.” she apologises. “We’re going to his other restaurant, right? 1980 or something?”.
“It’s called 1890. Yes! I can’t wait. I’ll book the table for 6pm. We won’t get away with being late for that one though. It just got a Michelin star so it’s going to be busy.”
She promises to be there at 5:45pm.
I don’t have a pet. I don’t have children. I don’t have to be up early the next day. I simply like to be home at least two hours before bedtime, and all my friends respect it.
Things weren’t always that way. I spent decades making excuses, and when I couldn’t get away with them, I’d stay out when I longed to be at home; showered, then on the sofa, winding down with a good book or mindless TV. Following this routine calms both my body and mind. And when it’s time to hit the hay, I drift off in minutes rather than tossing and turning. Back then, nobody understood my ritual, and honestly, even I thought I sounded like a grandparent. My friends also made leaving before them extremely difficult; chanting for “just one more”, or accusing me of “being boring”. At that point in my life, I wanted to stay as far away from that label as possible, so I went with the grain. I stayed out till all the others were ready to call it a night.
But then I grew up. Every year that passes, we care less and less about what others think. Not so much in a way that hurts them, but in a way that’s more transparent. I used to dread when friends talked about destination weddings because that meant I might be getting an invite. I went on many, using up valuable PTO to go and holiday with mostly strangers, doing things I didn’t want to do like paintballing (ouch!) or rehearsal dinners (snooze...). This is when I worked full-time and every day of annual leave was precious. On the contrary, I wouldn’t have (and years later when I eloped, didn’t) expected anyone to travel across the world and drop thousands just to see me put a ring on it. There are plenty of other ways to celebrate love. I instated a rule that I would not RSVP to any more destination weddings. No exceptions. Did I lose any friends? No. Did I have more time and money to go to places I actually wanted to go? Yes.
The rule worked so well that next, I put it towards promoting earlier evenings. I kept telling everyone that I needed to be home at a “reasonable” time for my bedtime ritual, and I was off the hook by around 11pm. Friends got used to seeing me head off first, and the funny thing is I noticed many followed suit. Even the so-called “night owls” admitted they loved starting the evenings earlier as it didn’t screw up their following day. Eventually, 9pm became my sweet spot for retiring home. I loved switching clubs for bars. You can have a conversation in a bar, and sometimes a little boogie if that’s the vibe. No fun lost.
I meet my friends after work in central nowadays, say 5:30pm or 6pm, and for three hours we wine and dine. When weekends roll around, we have the whole daytime at our disposal. For museums, afternoon tea, matinee shows, and the like. I don’t get FOMO since I get plenty of human interaction and enjoy a robust social life during those hours. Of course, there are exceptions. When my DJ friend had his birthday, the invite read 9pm to 2am. I told him in advance I’d stay till midnight before slipping out quietly. Irish exits are great at big events if you let the host know: nobody needs to feel bad and you don’t end up dragging others in the party out the door with you. I often offer to arrive early and help them set up, which gives us extra catch-up time too.
I’m certainly not the only one who is adopting the start-early, end-early social ethos. Burnout culture is among us, and many working folk are overpacking their schedules. Prioritising wellness means quality over quantity. I’d much rather spend three hours with one or two friends sipping from a vintage bottle of Billecart-Salmon than do an all-nighter with randos splashing Smirnoff. I do understand the appeal of the latter. Perhaps because I’m married, the former suits me far, far more.
We just need to be honest with ourselves and the circle we hang out with. People will respect your values if you make them crystal clear, and a rule helps set expectations so disappointment is avoided. Excuses are stressful, and you can only use them so many times.
I spent too long sacrificing my needs when those excuses ran out, but what I didn’t realise was saying no to someone else was, actually, saying yes to myself.
I knew what to expect. Both of my parents had experienced retinal detachments, so I was terrified but prepared. The warning signs sounded vague: “Be wary of sudden bright flashes or arcs of light,” doctors told me. In reality, it was more like hot white blaster fire ricocheting off the hull of an Imperial light cruiser. “Be wary of any new ‘floaters,’ ” they said. When the floaters came, they were like black, stringy Dementors descending unexpectedly over my field of vision.
I’ve always seen the world through this perspective—everything filtered through what I watched, heard, read, and loved. But consuming pop culture like the world was ending when it actually was wasn’t so much fun. By December 2020, we had binged, read, spun enough. My wife and I decided to focus on our health, going on nightly mile-long walks around our Forest Hills neighbourhood, in Queens. One evening, the symptoms started in my left eye. We rushed to a retina specialist for outpatient laser eye surgery. Pew-pew-pew, and the hole was patched. Phew. More lasers in subsequent visits (both eyes, to be safe). My own up-close-and-personal Pink Floyd light-show experience, with encore performances.
Our newfound fixation on health was timely. A staph infection puckered my left calf like Freddy Krueger’s. Meanwhile, gummy bears were apparently killing me—prediabetes had matured into full-blown Wilford Brimley–style “diabeetus.” I was hitting middle age hard. I was no Wolverine; my healing ability was vastly inferior. While my body was failing, my mind was racing. The realisation that “life moves pretty fast” made me channel my inner John Hughes, as I attacked my decades-gestating manuscript like I was frantically writing a Ferris Bueller sequel.
And so, at 48 years old, I was finally able to see my pandemic project, my debut novel, published to great acclaim. No one was happier than my mother. Her da xinganbao (“big precious”) was finally a published author. I have always taken after her family: thick black hair, broad nose, the love of the written word. I was inspired by my grandfather, a famous Chinese reporter who sacrificed everything to immigrate to the US for journalistic integrity. He then spent much of his life caring for his fragile wife, my grandmother, who suffered from anxiety and a weak heart. So much of them was yi chuan, inherited by us. The noble talents, but also the poor eyesight, diabetes, and mental-health issues.
My mother had spent much of her time looking after the men in her life: shuttling my grandfather to appointments, working 12-hour days while her husband pursued his doctorate, raising her sons to do good. But now, like mine, her priorities were shifting: The pandemic presented an opportunity. My mother informed me that she had started writing, too. Or rather, she had resumed writing, tapping back into the collegiate aspirations she abandoned when she began her life here in the States.
And so, at 73 years old, Grace I-Yin Jeng was finally able to see her pandemic project, her first essays, accepted for publication in a Chinese journal.
Both of us were always inspired by my grandfather’s professional legacy, even more so after he passed. His final message years prior was one simple eternal character, ai (“love”), writ large in marker across the unfolded panels of a Chinese newspaper, left on the table of his hospital bed. As I wrote about such big ideas expressed through small moments, I wondered what my mother was writing about. Her childhood in Taiwan and the Philippines? Her early struggles in New York City as an entrepreneur? (She owned three shoe stores.) Having two teenagers and then a third miracle baby in her 40s, or helping thousands as a Social Security caseworker? Her response: “Thoughts on the season changing to autumn—and about you becoming a writer.” She still can’t help but focus on the men in her life.
What no one saw coming: my vision growing exponentially worse. In August 2023, as I was starting the final edits on my book, the lasers stopped working on my left eye. I would have to go under the knife. The vitrectomy would replace my eyeball juice with fresh-squeezed artificial replacement fluid, and a self-dissolving gas bubble would be injected to push my retina into place. A painless procedure (thanks, propofol and Valium!), but the following seven days of constant facedown positioning would be absolute torture. I was inverted and sore, and sleeping with my CPAP machine (like Hannibal Lecter in his face mask) was inhumane. Worse yet, in December 2023, I learned that my right eye required the same process. I immediately burst into tears.
Most people will get cataracts (the slow, natural decay of the lenses in their eyes) as they enter their 70s and 80s. But as a result of these surgeries, my eyes are undergoing vast changes until they stabilise. I am fast developing cataracts and losing my sight. (And no, my other senses aren’t heightened. Turns out I’m not Daredevil, either.) Each check-up fills me with dread. If the vitrectomy surgeries don’t hold, I may need further procedures to save my vision. If it’s only the cataracts I have to contend with, then hopefully within the year, my eyeballs will be “ripe” enough for this next round of routine surgery to replace my zombified lenses. Nothing makes you feel so old as looking forward to receiving the same treatment as octogenarians.
On the other hand, my mom is in great health, hopping on airplanes and cruise ships. On her last visit to Taipei, she got a blue whale tattoo. In honour of my dad, the marine biologist? “No deeper meaning,” she insists. “It’s cute and I like the ocean.” My mother, pleading with her sons to take her to see Bon Jovi. My mother, smoking weed for the first time. She’s been in her renaissance. But plans don’t always work out; her Cabo trip was curtailed when my father grew uncharacteristically pale and refused the buffet. He’s been dealing with his own health crisis ever since: leukemia. While we are slowly being attacked by our own bodies, she keeps us afloat, as per usual—sorting the pills for my dad, sending frozen dumplings to me. All done with grace, by Grace.
Nothing makes you feel so old as looking forward to receiving the same treatment as octogenarians.
Her “big baby,” tall and strong. But now I can no longer lift anything heavier than a half-full banker’s box for fear of putting pressure on these fragile eyes. What I fear, what I am most wary of now, is time—our mortal flesh fades fast, in spite of all we have left to do, say, and see.
Recently, my mother started letting her bob go grey. My temples, too, grow more into the same signature silver of that pliant genius Reed Richards. But I feel further from fantastic, as my limbs become increasingly stiff and achy every day. My eyes, too, miss out on so much wonder before them.
My mother has read my novel and is my biggest champion. Soon I will get to read her new work—in translation, sized up to a 24-point font. But there are still so many stories she hasn’t yet written. I am afraid to ask about them, to hear them spoken in this life or the next. But isn’t everything that’s inherited and passed down simply about ai—love—in the end? At my book events, I can make out her shape, beaming proudly from the front row, that familiar magnetic red phone case flapping wildly as she tries to record a video. What I experience now, however, is all blurry, hazy like a dream. I’m hoping once my vision is renewed, I’ll get to see this all again with her, for the first time and not the last.
Originally published on Esquire US
No is my first word when people ask if my partner, Ben, and I are planning to have children. “But,” I will continue, and Ben will steel himself for what he knows is coming, “we’re not ruling out a Punky Brewster situation.” We do not want a baby. But if a sassy preteen with her own unique fashion sense were to be abandoned in a grocery-store parking lot, as on the ’80s NBC sitcom? We’ll take that kid in, teach her some important life lessons—and along the way, maybe learn some, too. If it happens, it happens.
I don’t want kids of my own. For a long time, I assumed the desire to be a father would just blink on after a certain number of years, like a check-engine light on my emotional dashboard. But it never did. Not enough to get the wheels turning on it, to make me spend the fortune surrogacy costs or the time adoption does. Ben and I can’t accidentally have a baby, so the decision would need to be made with a high degree of intention. That intention was never there, and the only thing a kid needs less than an ambivalent father is two of them. So now we’re hovering around either end of 50, the ship long having sailed.
We’re probably never going to have children. And I’m fine with that.
So why did I add a probably to that sentence two sentences ago?
Recently, my friend John said this to me: “What you do on a Sunday is who you are.” He’s right. You’re in church if you’re religious, you’re on your bike in spandex if you’re sporty, you’re at a matinee if you’re old and have a large bag of wrapped candies you’ve been meaning to open. If you have kids, your Sundays are busy: You’re carting them from a birthday party to a soccer practice to an urgent-care facility. You’re putting other people’s needs before your own, and those people frequently vomit on you. You’re a parent. Every day and always.
John doesn’t have kids, either. We had this conversation on a Sunday afternoon, over Bloody Marys, actively avoiding any further reflection on what that made us.
Roughly 15 years ago, my friends around my age started having babies, and I started to see them less and less. When I did, they came with strollers and pacifiers and water wings from a product universe I do not interact with. Over the summer, my high school friend Neil was in town with his wife and three kids, the youngest of whom is my godson, and I had them over to the pool for the afternoon. “Can I pick up anything,” Neil texted, and I replied, “Nope, we’re pretty well stocked up.” And then I texted back, “Actually, can you grab literally anything a child would eat or drink?”
My friend John said to me: “What you do on a Sunday is who you are.” This was on a Sunday, over Bloody Marys.
I don’t know that replacing those friends was on my mind, but around that time I did form new friendships with people a decade or so younger. People who could drop everything and go see a band with me on a Tuesday. People whose Sundays were wide open.
Now those guys have started having babies.
Recently at a dinner party, someone asked me if I had kids, and I said the Punky Brewster thing, and I was met with a blank face. “You don’t know who Punky Brewster is,” I said. A moment later, he lit up. “Wait, yes,” he said. “Teenage doctor.” This guy was a couple decades younger than me, too young to know Punky Brewster from Doogie Howser, MD. He has three kids. I wish him the best of luck.
The conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony said, “The only honourable thing is to get married and have children, lots of children, and raise them, and if you’re not doing that, then what you’re doing is dishonourable.” This is a harsh assessment, and I take comfort in the fact that the approval of a conservative philosopher is probably not on the menu for me. But this message gets across in subtler, more familiar ways. En route to visit one of my nieces and her newborn son with my mother—now a great-grandmother—she enthused, “Oh, isn’t this fun.” And then she continued, “Can you even imagine not having children?” It wasn’t a memory lapse, exactly. It was a statement of our shared humanity: We’re good people, and good people have kids. Right?
In America there has always been a low-key dismissal of people who choose not to be parents. You’re assumed to be feckless, or selfish, or sad. When America’s Sweetheart J.D Vance griped to Tucker Carlson about the “childless cat ladies” who evidently run America, he then described the childless as “miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made, so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
I don’t want to be a father, and I know I don’t want America to be miserable about it. But there is enough of a cultural expectation for a man to be a dad that sometimes I have to stop and think: Wait, am I miserable about it? Am I having fun, or am I just telling myself I am?
I still see my friends who are parents. But the kids from that first wave are getting to be teenagers, and soon they’ll have driver’s licenses and better things to do than hear a bunch of old people yell about Paul Westerberg. I get to see the new wave of kids, too, and discover what kinds of parents my young friends are becoming. There aren’t a ton of role models for the childless in general, and we’re in the first generation of gay men to get old en masse, period. Some days I feel like we’re pioneers, and some days it feels like we’re just lost in the woods.
And then I’ll say, “Hey, Ben, let’s get on a plane and go somewhere this weekend,” and we do. If what you do on a Sunday is who you are, then I am what I always wanted to be, which is whatever I feel like. I hope that doesn’t make you miserable.
Originally published on Esquire US
It was 10am on a Sunday, and I, of course, was still in bed. In my floating consciousness, I felt hands on my shoulder—someone was shaking me vigorously. This immediately sent me into alert mode because being shaken awake had been a rarity since my secondary school days. I’d usually groan and ignore the person, but on that day, I felt sober. My eyes shot open to find my sister hovering over me, which was odd because she wasn’t someone to wake me up without a reason. When she spoke, her voice sounded almost puzzled as she said, “Kobe Bryant just died.”
My sister doesn’t watch basketball, let alone play it. I could give her two pictures—one of Michael Jordan, another of Kobe Bryant—and five times out of ten, she’d probably point to MJ and say, “That’s Kobe Bryant.” She’s clueless when it comes to sports, but she knew his name. She knew how important he was, and she knew the impact his death would have—not just on me but on the world.
“Without studying, preparation, and practice, you’re leaving the outcome to fate. I don’t do fate.” — Kobe Bryant
Perhaps it’s the idea of this man, who seemed to conquer every challenge he ever faced through sheer will, perishing helplessly in a fiery blaze. Or maybe it’s the heartbreaking loss of his 13-year-old daughter, Gianna, alongside him and seven other passengers. Maybe it’s the cruel irony of both—a larger-than-life figure who spent his life obsessing over dictating his own destiny, reduced to a mere mortal, powerless during his final moments, unable to protect the daughter he cherished above anything else.
Whatever the reason, his death was devastating to basketball fans worldwide—so much so that it seems they’ve subconsciously created a religion built around him. Fans now hunt for significant sporting dates that coincide with the jersey numbers he wore for the Lakers, 8 and 24. Twenty-fourth of August has become the unofficial, official Kobe Day. Yet, in the recently concluded Paris Olympics, the gold medal basketball game between France and the USA fell on 8/10/24—a date that incorporates not only his Lakers numbers but also the 10 he wore as an Olympian.
Wait, so which is the real Kobe Day? Fans see his jersey numbers lining up on the calendar and convince themselves of a greater cosmic design. After all, what are the odds of the gold medal game happening on Kobe Day? They need to win gold for Kobe. Kobe will make sure Team USA wins. This is Kobe speaking to us. Ironically, the same men who mock women for following astrology now find themselves doing the same thing through Kobe numerology. This is precisely how fans have inadvertently formed a sports-centric faith around the Black Mamba, without even realising it.
For those unfamiliar, Bryant bestowed himself the nickname Black Mamba in the mid-2000s to create an alter ego that helped him separate his personal life and tap into an unrelenting focus on the court. Rumours suggest he drew inspiration from a documentary about the black mamba snake, admired for its fearlessness, precision, and deadly strike—qualities that mirrored his fierce approach to basketball. You still hear tales today of his unmatched work ethic, passed down by his peers and contemporaries:
Kobe played a bench warmer to 100 multiple times when he was in high school. In his worst game, he still won 100–12.
Mamba used to learn Spanish and French so he could trash-talk European players in their native languages and psych them out.
In 2015, Kobe injured his right shoulder in a game but continued playing single-handedly with his left hand.
During the 2008 Olympics, Kobe would come in at 8 a.m. with ice on his knees, sweat-drenched through his workout gear. Meanwhile, players like LeBron James and Dwyane Wade were still yawning and asking, “Where in the hell is he coming from?”
These stories now linger in the archives of YouTube, are given new life on Instagram and repackaged for new audiences on TikTok. Because of Kobe’s untimely death, these stories are on the path to becoming myths—but who’s to say they won’t eventually transform into legends?
Every religion needs a scripture; some kind of moral or ethical code to live by. Kobe fans, of course, have the “Mamba Mentality,” a philosophy created by Bryant himself that preaches discipline, perseverance, and curiosity. Bryant even published a book titled The Mamba Mentality: How I Play, offering a detailed guide to his mindset and practices. The book, like a scripture, contains personal reflections, wisdom, and lessons, and is treated like a source of truth for those seeking to emulate Bryant's success. Other elite athletes like Naomi Osaka and Anthony Davis have adopted this mindset, appearing almost as apostles to Bryant’s teachings. But this framework transcends sports itself—the idea that, through rigorous application of the Mamba Mentality, one can achieve a form of immortality through lasting impact and legacy is malleable and can be applied to various areas of life.
The idea of religious themes in sports isn’t something new. In the book Understanding Sport as a Religious Phenomenon, Eric Bain-Selbo and Gregory Sapp posit that the human need that drives religious participation—a sense of belonging, identity, and emotional experiences—are the same needs that compel people to engage deeply in sports. Think of mass gatherings, chants, and superstitions that reflect traditional religious expressions. Are you seeing the parallel?
Kobe Bryant wasn’t perfect. In 2003, a 19-year-old hotel employee accused him of sexual assault. While Bryant maintained that the encounter was consensual, the accuser disagreed, leading to a civil lawsuit that was eventually settled outside of court. It was a horrific situation that left the victim scarred and Bryant’s reputation obliterated.
Redemption is a powerful narrative often found in religious texts, and Bryant’s life reflects this narrative of repentance and public forgiveness. Following his legal issue, he issued a public apology to the victim and began repairing his personal life with his wife and children. In the years that followed, his family weathered the storm, and Bryant matured. He became deeply involved in charitable work, particularly in youth sports, education, and initiatives that supported disadvantaged communities. On the court, he became a mentor for young athletes, positioning himself as a role model who inspired many with his work ethic and dedication. After his retirement, he became a primary advocate for women’s basketball, emphasising the need for greater support for female athletes—who historically received less attention and funding compared to men’s sports. As a proud “girl dad” of three daughters, Bryant dedicated time to coaching his daughter Gianna’s youth basketball team.
For many fans, the last image they have of him is of a tender, loving father who passionately shared his love of basketball with his daughter—a far cry from his younger days when stories of his intensity and playing style screamed macho, red-blooded energy. While we cannot speak for the victims or assume their forgiveness, in the public eye, this journey quietly marked the closing chapter of Bryant’s life story of redemption.
A decade ago, kids would yell “Kobe!” as they shot crumpled paper into trash bins. Whether kids nowadays still yell his name before taking a shot or have replaced it with “Curry” remains uncertain. The future generation’s understanding of Bryant’s legacy and its lasting impact is yet to unfold. Will the next wave of athletes born after Bryant’s death practice the Mamba Mentality as a guiding philosophy? Will they look to him and start praying before important games? I don’t know, but it’s fascinating to observe.
For now, what seems certain is the unifying power of Bryant’s legacy among his devoted fans. Across different backgrounds, cultures, and political ideologies, there is a shared identity and common ground to be had. This social cohesion spans oceans and borders, satisfying the human need for connection, inspiration, and belonging. After all, this has long been the role religion has served for societies, centuries before the deification of Kobe Bryant.
Beware the cunning fox. According to evolutionary biologists, the rural red fox (Vulpes vulpes) has been steadily, stealthily begging her way into our home and hearth for nearly a century now. It wasn’t until this year, though, that I actually found one on my doorstep.
It was about 11 o’clock on a fine spring night when a crashing noise out front alerted me to the visitor. I was inside, with the curtains drawn, watching the 1989 Kevin Costner-starring film Field of Dreams, while my family slept upstairs. Have you seen the 1989 Kevin Costner-starring film Field of Dreams? It’s about Ray (Costner), an Iowa farmer, who staves off mid-life ennui, fear of mortality and unresolved feelings of guilt towards his dead father, by mowing down his profitable cornfield and building in its stead a baseball field for ghosts.
Everyone tells Ray he’s lost it; that he’ll go bankrupt, his wife will leave him and take the kid, but this man has an unshakable faith, summed up by the film’s most famous line: “If you build it, he will come.” Good film, that Field of Dreams. And maybe, too, there’s something of the doggedly optimistic, “If-you-build-it-he-will-come” attitude in the foxes’ plot to get in good with us humans?
It was right at that point in the film when the ghost of Archie “Moonlight” Graham (Burt Lancaster) is finally stepping up to bat, after wasting his life and sporting promise as a much-beloved small-town doctor, when I heard that crashing sound. I hit pause on Field of Dreams and opened the front door to a Patio of Nightmares: my window box, upturned and smashed; soil and geraniums strewn all over, and there, lying across my welcome mat, in a gruesome parody of inter-species friendship, was the bloody corpse of an adult fox. The sound of feral teen laughter floating off into the night air offered the only clue as to what had happened.
Sadly not everyone is as alert to the foxes’ stratagems as I have now become
What now? Was my home being marked as a future target for young Satanists? Was this a warning to repent my urban ways and respect the awesome power of Mother Nature? After fly-tipping the remains in an undisclosed location (Sorry to Newham Council, but have you ever tried to dispose of a body before the school-run?), I settled instead on these two take-away truths: 1) Broken Britain needs to bring back the youth clubs, and 2) There are more foxes about than there used to be.
Scientists attribute this latter point to a process known as “self-domestication”. There isn’t total consensus on the cause, but one widespread theory suggests that as human cities have expanded and encroached on rural habitats, foxes have adapted by becoming more tame. Zoologists define “tameness” as an animal’s tolerance of humans in close proximity. Or, in the human species, a tolerance of other humans in close proximity, as evidenced by, say, choosing to stay at home of an evening and watch a Kevin Costner film, instead of going out on the prowl with the rest of your pack.
Foxes are likewise tiring of the nightlife. As with those adult children who move back in with their parents after a few years of paying sky-high London rents on gutter-low salaries, foxes are sick of living by their wits and fending for themselves. They want in on the cushy lifestyle of the pet dog or cat. The short game might be to bury Dixy Fried Chicken in your flower bed, but the long game is to snuggle up beside you in your marital bed.
Sadly not everyone is as alert to the foxes’ stratagems as I have now become. About 20 minutes up the North Circular, in my mum’s more gentrified London suburb, humans still have the upper hand in the vulpine-sapien power struggle and a certain complacency has set in. Would I look in on the house, my mum asked, while she was away on holiday? Sure. Would I water the plants and feed the cat? Of course. And would I also put some food out for the fox family that frequents her back garden, along with their mange medication from the vet? Absolutely not.
My principled stand, however heroic, is a lonely one. I’m yet to hear of any London households officially keeping a fox as a pet, but the foxes make regular, unopposed incursions and have long since won the air war of propaganda. Three of my children’s classmates are named “Fox” (“Fox” is to the little bourgeois boy babies of 2024 as “Jack” was in 1994); a local community mural has been unveiled, of a Disney-eyed fox staring wistfully at a butterfly; and everyone now knows the source of those once-mysterious strangled screams you hear at night. It’s not someone being murdered. Well, it might be. But it’s also the foxes’ obnoxiously loud mating call, a reminder that they’re having more sex than the rest of us.
A glance in the mirror reassures me my ears are as firm as ever and likewise my strong, virile jaw
Not for long, though. According to Dmitry Belyayev, the Soviet geneticist whose decades-long experiment studied domestication in a group of silver foxes, tameness is only the first stage in the process. Next comes the gradual occurrence of corresponding biological changes, such as “reduced sexual dimorphism” (becoming less sexually attractive), floppier ears and smaller jaws. A glance in the mirror reassures me my ears are as firm as ever and likewise my strong, virile jaw, but worryingly, another of Belyayev’s tell-tale signs, “fur depigmentation”, is evident in grey patches around my temples. Arguably, I’m also showing “unique coat colours and patterns”, having started to dress more like a CBeebies presenter, in primary-coloured jumpsuits and “fun” knitwear, ever since the birth of my first child.
Perhaps the smart move here is to stop fighting it and make peace, not only with the foxes’ domestication, but also with my own. I could do that. Or—hear me out—I could mow down my mum’s hollyhocks and convert her garden into a fox-sized baseball field in the hopes of attracting their ghosts to replay the 1919 World Series. People will think I’ve lost it, but then, didn’t they say the same thing about Kevin Costner?
Originally published on Esquire UK
My process of composition is a long and sinuous one: first an idea comes to me, usually by serendipity. I can now allow the idea to incubate and grow into a fully formed piece—a novel or a short story. That period of incubation is often long, but when the story spills onto the page I am often satisfied because it has been a long time forming. But in 2011 when I completed the novel I had been writing since 2009, I felt that the narrative perspective was not right. It wasn’t a third-person narration; I had already tried that. It wasn’t a simple first-person narration; I had already tried that too. So what then? I left the book in frustration and began writing other things until I flew to Nigeria that summer. It had rained on my way to our house in Makurdi, but on arriving, the sun was shining and it had turned hot. I took a quick shower and lay in my old bed, now occupied by my younger brother Benjamin, who was nine at the time.
Benjamin had been waiting for me to come to the room so he could talk to me alone. He was taller than I had thought he would be—I hadn’t seen him in three years. He had a small scar on the side of his head, and even in the heat, he’d put the new cheap shirt I had bought him over the soap-worn one he was wearing. He was happy. He was talking, wanting to fill me in on the happenings since I was gone. Did I know that there have been changes in the neighbourhood? A new supermarket had been built just two blocks from our house—did I see it? I nodded, yawning. The family next door, who lived in the shack that formed this big contrast with our concrete, gated house, lost their dad last year—did I hear about it? I perhaps didn’t answer. I was tired from the 16 or so hours travel, falling asleep.
“Eh, brother, you know last week there was this boy, he was big. He was beating every-body, like a superman... but I fought him and beat him!”
These were words said in between some longer narrative, to which I was murmuring only mhmm, oh, while thinking of Cyprus from which I had just arrived, the friends left there, my apartment, and the new position the university was offering me. But now I was shaken awake. “There was even that new house with that blue roof. They have these two boys, twins. Ah, they can run really fast! That one, Ignatus—he can run. They are rabbits! And, they even go to that public school with many children... they are ants... they are all doves!”
A boy was a superman. Two boys are rabbits. Some schoolchildren are ants. Some adults are doves. These are not comparisons in the way I was used to, but associations. Benjamin, at only nine, did not have the ability to understand complex phenomena like violence, the absence of his older brother, marriage or things beyond his comprehension. So, he attempted to make sense of them through associations with thing she understood better—comics or animals (he owned an encyclopedia of animals that he treasured). This was why, when a boy bigger than him beat him, he could only explain this defeat as having fought with a “superman”. If kids can run so fast in the case of the twins, they must be “rabbits”. I knew at once that my younger brother’s childish babbling had opened a door that I had been banging at for many months. That night, I rewrote the entire novel, recasting the story of this fractured family through the lens of the youngest of four brothers, Benjamin, nine, who narrates the story by comparing everything to animals: “Father was an Eagle”; “Ikenna was a Python”; “Mother was a Falconer”; “Boja was Fungus”.
It was easier to make the choice on how to tell the story in the second novel. But later that year, I wrote a short story in which I faced a similar struggle. I had written it this time in the form it should be, but “The Strange Story of the World” lacked a narrative core. My father was visiting the US, and we were driving from Nebraska to Michigan. We had been in a debate about Christianity in Nigeria—my father defending the modern form, me arguing that it was corrupted and doing much harm. We stopped at a rest place and when we got back in the car, he wanted to change the subject. So, he began singing a song I hadn’t heard him sing in years, perhaps, in two decades. It was a song about hope being something that must be preserved. For some reason, this song—even though I hadn’t heard it in a long time—felt like the background music of my childhood, of my family story if it were to be made into a film. And as the cars stirred back to life, it occurred to me that the story of the family I was telling in the piece must revolve around a song.
We took a turn once this epiphany happened and I looked at my father, concluding his singing, and said to him, “Daddy, thank you for that!”
“What?” he said.
Years later, I began work on a new novel about the Biafran War of Independence. My mother was born in 1961, and only nine when the war ended. She knew that an uncle went to fight and never returned, and that one of her older brothers fought and survived. She knew about the hunger, the drills, the death she witnessed and heard about. At first, she wondered why that war, why was it a thing to be written about? She did not get it, I argued, plus it was too late. I had already finished what I believed was a complete draft.
We were sitting on the porch of her house in a town near Umuahia, and she was gazing at the sun shining through the palm trees, picking her teeth with a chewing stick. She sighed, looked at me and said, “OK, but there is something you should know about telling stories of wars.”
“What?” I said.
“Wars are meant to produce large-scale deaths,” she said in Igbo. “So, its primary subjects are often dead people, I fu go?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But, when stories of wars are told, they are told only by who? The living! Ha, but that is never complete. If the story of a war must be truly and fully told, it has to be told by both the living and the dead.”
My mother went quiet as my unwitting collaborators—my brother, father, and now mother—often did after unknowingly changing the shape of a project.
In the silence I could hear only bird cries. Two of them were floating just overhead on a thermal, the sun on their wings. I knew, watching them and with my mother’s words in my head, that the novel I had just finished would have to completely change.
Originally published on Esquire UK
Around 6:00 p.m. every day, groups of mostly South and Central American people gather outside the Row NYC hotel on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. When the hotel opened in 1928, The New York Times described the new building, then called the Lincoln, as “high class” and built in an “Italian” style. Much of that grandeur still exists on the outside, with its limestone and terra-cotta flourishes.
Today, the Row is a migrant shelter, and the people standing outside it are hoping to secure a room for the night. I pass by them most evenings when I walk from my office near Central Park to Penn Station. Donald Trump and his allies have called migrants like them “animals” who are “poisoning the blood” of America.
The people outside the Row are mostly multigenerational families: young parents, their small children, and often grandparents. The kids are usually in strollers, not a tablet in sight to distract them. The parents look desperate. They are the “huddled masses” described in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty, only a few miles away.
These men, women, and children are mostly not Americans—not yet at least—but there is something uniquely American about them. They are courageous, having left their homes and traveled thousands of miles in search of a better life for themselves and their children. During the Great Depression, when the crops failed and the factories shuttered, thousands of U.S. citizens packed up their families and moved to California in search of a better life for themselves and their children. They possessed “qualities of…courage and inventiveness and energy,” John Steinbeck wrote in Esquire. “If we had a national character and a national genius, these people, who were beginning to be called Okies, were it. With all the odds against them, their goodness and strength survived.”
A few blocks from where these migrants are seeking shelter, Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden on 27 October. Many of the speakers that night directed their ire at these stateless people. Conservative radio host Sid Rosenberg said, “The fucking illegals, they get whatever they want, don’t they?” Stephen Miller, a former Trump adviser, said, “America is for Americans, and Americans only,” echoing a slogan from Nazi Germany. The former president did not denounce those statements. It was just another night in the 2024 presidential election, which has felt like an outer circle of hell, an eternal shitshow. On Election Day, the race is a tossup.
We know what Donald Trump will do, or try to do, if he wins the 2024 presidential election. He has told us: prosecute his political enemies, deploy the U.S. military against U.S. citizens, punish states run by Democrats, seal the border, round up the people outside the Row hotel and deport them. If he follows through, it would be unlike anything Americans have experienced.
This essay is not an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Rather, it is an attempt to answer this question: What happens to America if she loses?
When Donald Trump won in 2016, most of the country was shocked, including Donald Trump himself. Once the shock subsided, it looked to many of the people who didn’t vote for him that this was some terrible mistake. An aberration. Tired of sending the same people to Washington, D.C., voters cast the die for an outlier—they fucked around and found out. After four years, they voted him out, and he did everything possible to remain in power, including whipping up a mob to attack the Capitol Building. On the evening of January 6, 2021, senators from both parties denounced Trump, and it seemed this chapter in American history had come to a dark conclusion.
The pragmatic view of Trump’s return is that politics is cyclical. The arc of history doesn’t bend toward justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. once suggested. It is a seesaw that bounces between liberalism—it was only four years ago that people protested in the streets for the cause of social justice—and conservatism.
The other view of a second Trump presidency is that something has fundamentally changed in America. If Trump is elected again, it will not be a mistake. Voters have been confronted with Trump for the past eight years. They know exactly who he is. Instead, the election of Donald Trump will force everyone in this country to reconsider what we are as a nation.
What is America? Yes, it is a collection of states and territories bound together by a document, the Constitution. But more than anything else, America is an idea, a nation of men and women enshrined with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and Americans have an idea about themselves.
We are a nation that built cities and railroads, defeated the Nazis and the Soviet Union, fought for and won voting and civil rights for women and people of colour. Many of us or our ancestors traveled thousands of miles from our homes in other lands in search of a new life for ourselves and our children. Our faults as a nation are plenty. We butchered Indigenous people to take their land and build our cities and railroads; we exploited the labor of enslaved people; we dropped an atomic bomb on Japanese cities to end World War II and stockpiled nuclear weapons to beat the Soviets; we continue to marginalise people of colour.
But the prevailing idea is that we are a fundamentally decent people.
If Trump is elected to a second term, it will anger and sadden tens of millions. Many will feel that their lives and livelihood are threatened. Recently, I was speaking to the mother of a friend. She is an elderly Hispanic woman who fears Trump will deport her. She is an American citizen. As a straight, white male citizen of this country, I probably have the least to lose under a Trump administration, though I would fear for my two young daughters. If he is elected again, I believe our fundamental decency as a nation will erode. Telling thousands of people inside an arena that the huddled masses a few blocks away are inhuman will not be gross misbehaviour; it will become normal. It will become policy. It will become part of our national fabric.
A second Trump presidency will dramatically and, perhaps, permanently alter the idea of America. Maybe that’s exactly what America wants. When Esquire profiled former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon last year, he said to the writer, Chris Heath: “You’re a reasonable man in the middle….You’re a kindhearted person, you think both sides are wrong. It’s like Ecclesiastes. It’s just not your time. I hate to say it: It’s just not your time. It’s us versus them. They hate us and we hate them. One side’s going to win here. And it’s going to get ugly. It’s going to get messy.”
That line has haunted me since I read it, because what if Bannon is right? What if we do live in a different time, in which Americans can’t find common ground, in which they are not kindhearted people; instead, we are a nation that both detests migrants and hates our fellow citizens, a nation that punishes its political enemies and deploys the military upon everyone else? Maybe those among us who want America to be decent are in the minority. Maybe America has already changed, and our politics are only catching up. But that’s not the idea Americans have held up about themselves during my lifetime.
After I walk through the scrum of people outside the Row hotel, and past Madison Square Garden, I board a train and travel sixteen miles to my home in suburban New Jersey. In my village of about four thousand people, the voter rolls are split about 50/50 Republican and Democrat. Some houses are adorned with enormous Trump flags; others have small yard signs bearing the names of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. At parties and soccer games, we rarely talk national politics, even though it’s on everyone’s mind.
On Halloween night, I walked around our neighbourhood with my wife and kids and our friends and their kids. One of the women in our group wore a Kamala Harris T-shirt. As we strolled through the streets buzzing with children dressed as monsters and princesses and the emotions from Inside Out 2, we bumped into neighbours wearing Trump T-shirts and hats. The woman with the Harris shirt and one of the guys with a Trump hat are old friends. They talked about their kids and their jobs. They laughed about the last party they attended together and promised to get together soon at another party. There was none of the hatred Bannon described.
This gives me hope.
So do the people outside the Row hotel. “With all the odds against them,” Steinbeck wrote in Esquire, “their goodness and strength survived.”
Originally published on Esquire US
Have you ever wondered about the concept of time? Whether we consciously choose to take notice of it or not, time remains constant. For some, time may feel like a continuous force that races by and never stops. While for others, time is cherished and embraced as a precious commodity. Over the years, my journey with time and my love for horology has impacted the way I view and approach life.
Admittedly during my early teens, I had little to no interest in watches. To me, they were merely an accessory to tell time, and I had always been the kid who preferred tinkering and getting handsy instead with tech gadgets. At the end of high school, the social media wave took over and photos of trendy timepieces would flood my feed. I vividly remember being exposed to the macro and caseback magic and that was how my love story with horology began. In fact, the more I learnt about the intricate workings and how the delicate balance of gears, springs and hands moved in perfect synchrony, I became increasingly captivated. Horology was a slippery slope, they said; but still, I could not look away.
Over time, I realised I would subconsciously link personal objects to a special occasion, milestone or a specific period of my life. My first watch was gifted to me by my father: a Rolex Datejust 16233 to commemorate my 18th birthday. For me, this timepiece marked the beginning of my journey into adulthood and horology; and today remains a treasured heirloom. My watch collection is essentially a time capsule of my favourite memories and achievements. Some of these pieces also serve as tangible reminders of real moments in time, such as losing a loved one, as well as learning to embrace the little things in the everyday. Life is truly a series of interconnected events, each with its own significance and timing.
If life moves with time, then we are expected to be adaptable and resilient, just as watches require regular winding and adjustments. Horology has taught me to embrace both change and continuity. Case in point, we often see vintage watches being restored to their former glory, symbolising the ability to adapt and renew. On the other hand, modern pieces that push the limits of watchmaking are also more present than ever, representing innovation and progress. This balance of old and new honours the past and embraces the future, mirroring my own growth and journey. Moreover, my passion for horology has given me numerous opportunities to intimately experience timepieces I never imagined I would, as I immersed myself in the watch community.
From piece uniques and tourbillons to minute repeaters and grand complications. The child in me would never have expected this to be a reality. As much as it is a delight to encounter such exquisite watches, the true value of my hobby lies in the authentic and heartfelt friendships I have formed over the years through watch communities. The camaraderie and shared experiences make every moment in this hobby deeply rewarding and memorable.
As individuals, it is important for us to have something relatable in all that we do, and I am thankful that my love for horology has provided me with that connection. From scouring the depths of the Internet for information on specific watch references, to now knowing some of the most knowledgeable and humble people in the industry, I am grateful for how far this unexpected hobby has taken me.
Ryan Ong's writings on watches can be found at Curated Times.
As I write this, Taylor Swift will be boarding one of her private aircraft and jetting off for Paris, bringing to an end the months of foolishness that culminated in her six sell-out Singapore stadium shows. Out of love for my daughters, I spent hours in front of the laptop unsuccessfully attempting to purchase tickets to those concerts. 'Twas a fool's errand. Matched only in silliness by the task of schlepping to the stadium this past weekend and standing in the midday sun for 90 minutes to secure the consolation prize of outrageously overpriced Swiftie merch.
While we missed Tay-Tay, earlier this year, my eldest and I were fortunate enough to catch the opening night of another artistic showcase. One possessing somewhat greater cultural merit than Ms Swift’s 3.5-hour performances of polished pop. (At least, that’s what I thought. My teenage daughter may beg to differ.) Held as part of Singapore Art Week, Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics was an exhibition staged by local non-profit The Institutum across several venues at Gillman Barracks. The exhibit collected the works of 100 noted artists of Asian or African background, including Ai Wei Wei, Yinka Shonibare CBE and Nick Cave (the American sculptor, performance artist, fashion designer and academic, not the moody Australian troubadour).
The exhibition’s curator, Zoe Whitley, director of the Chisenhale Gallery in East London, said it intended to highlight "the solidarity and synergies between cultures of the Asian and African diasporas." In conversation the day before the opening, Whitley told me beyond that goal, she hoped the art on the show would confound preconceptions of African or Asian art and defy more granular, national-level stereotypes. "People should come with an open mind," she advised.
"A lot of the artists in the exhibition have the lived experience of—certainly with institutional invitations— being asked to do something because they’re Korean, because they’re Malaysian, because they’re South African," or what have you, she said. Whitley felt the works she’d curated would surprise visitors carrying pre-conceived notions of what Asian or African art might look like. "The fact that by just looking at it, you wouldn't necessarily be able to identify which artwork came from which part of the world is kind of the point," she said.
"In thinking about what’s projected onto us, it’s important for us to not necessarily be tethered by expectations," she explained. "None of the artists in this exhibition are reducing themselves or their possibilities. You wouldn’t look at Bronwyn Katz, for example, and think, oh, that's quintessentially South African art. Every artist (featured in the exhibition) is thinking in new and exciting ways," she said.
"With this exhibition, what is crucial is the diasporic experience," Whitley noted. "That sense of what it means to spread, to migrate, to be from one place and to make a home somewhere else." She felt this common background of being a migrant or the descendant of migrants—an origin story shared by every one of us in Singapore—was what bound these works by artists of disparate racial, national, spiritual and cultural backgrounds.
"Once you've come from somewhere else, what does that mean for creating a new culture?" she pondered. When you’ve settled in a new country, "What does it mean to be Chinese? What does it mean to be Korean? What does it mean to be Ghanaian or Nigerian or African American?" Whitley asked. "So many of the artists, those who I know personally in this exhibition, have had that sense of not being X enough in one place, or being too X in another"—a foreigner in both the land of their origins and their adopted home.
As the surname suggests, winemaker Max Schubert’s family were of German background. Regardless, he didn't hesitate from enlisting with the Australian army and shipping off to fight the Nazis during WWII. After serving with distinction, Schubert resumed work at Penfolds Wines, where he'd started as a messenger boy in 1931. Appointed chief winemaker in 1948, aged just 33, Schubert journeyed back to Europe to see how things were done at legendary Bordeaux estates such as Château Lafite Rothschild and Château Margaux.
He returned to Australia with a vision for making a wine that would stand up against anything produced in the Old World; a robust red that would get better and better with age. Initially working in secret, Schubert created a bold yet nuanced shiraz he dubbed "Grange Hermitage". Some 70 years later, Grange is among the world's most respected and sought-after wines, described by uber-critic Robert Parker as "a leading candidate for the richest, most concentrated dry table wine on planet Earth."
Several years ago, I sat at dinner next to a representative of a historic, highly respected French winery. They whispered in my ear as a glass of Grange was served, "Ah, mais non, we have nothing that can beat this." I recently related this story to Penfolds' senior winemaker Steph Dutton. I asked how she felt about being the guardian of what is probably Australia’s foremost luxury export.
"You feel excited and proud," she said. "And nervous. Australians have a huge affection for Penfolds. And obviously, they're incredibly proud about Penfolds Grange representing 'Brand Australia' to the rest of the world." As the market for Grange spans the globe, Dutton said, "Export markets are always going to be important to us as a brand. So making sure that we benchmark against the world's best of the best—that keeps us operating to a higher standard."
As a vigneron, you're always thinking about legacy. About leaving something for the next generation, preserving the brand's reputation for the long-term, Dutton said. "There’s this lovely reminder that as winemakers, every single time you put something to bottle, it will probably outlive you, with our flagships anyway: Grange, Bin 707, and so forth," she said, namechecking Penfolds' top-tier shiraz and cabernet sauvignon, respectively.
Bottles of Schubert’s inaugural 1951 vintage Grange are still being consumed. One was sold at auction in December 2021 for a record AUD157,624 (SGD138,630), the highest price ever paid for an Australian wine. This longevity means Penfolds' best wines preserve triumphs and failures for decades to come. "If there's something that's not right, you're probably going to have to face up to that literally for the rest of your life," as Dutton put it. "That is a good double-check we use when we're doing our work: if we're not proud of something, let's figure out what we need to change."
That's not to say Penfolds is mired in tradition. Don't forget that the very creation of Grange was an act of rebellion, and many of the house's signature bin-numbered labels began life as risky winemaking experiments. "Our winemakers do a really good job of respecting the work of their predecessors and looking at what tradition counts for," Dutton said. But she reckons the company’s design and marketing departments keep the traditionalists on their toes with moves like bringing Japanese street-style icon, A Bathing Ape founder Nigo, aboard for creative collabs. "They do a really good job of making sure that we’re always nudged forward." Looking to the future? Nothing foolish about that.
When I was 40, I raised my fists and did not run away from a fight for the first time since sixth grade.
It happened in a gym straight out of a Rocky movie. I was spending that year working in a rented office on the second floor of a three-story walk-up in Rome, Georgia. I filled my time staring out the office window, tapping gloomily at my keyboard on a failing project. One day, I heard banging.
Fire-escape stairs led to a newly cleared third floor. “A gym,” an intense, wiry man said. And sure enough: heavy bags, speed bags, weights. Along one brick wall: a ring, canvas duct-taped directly to the wood floor. Plaster hung in patches; the bags hung directly from exposed roof joists.
The wiry man was Lee Fortune, onetime holder of the World Boxing Council’s Continental Americas middleweight title. Did I want to learn to box? Lee, a cop, planned to work the gym around his schedule. It would be USD25 a month for limitless time and coaching, several afternoons a week. “Not kickboxing,” he said. “Real boxing. Sparring. You’ll wear headgear.” I said sure.
“A man you’ve never met before said for USD25 he will hit you in the head,” a friend summarised. What else did I have going on?
But there was more. When I was growing up in suburban Cleveland, unless you were an athlete, you were a school playground victim. You were pushed, teased, hit; I was, anyway. The adults in those days blithely assured us that standing up for yourself cured bullies but I never witnessed that. I tried once, against my will, in sixth grade. The class decided, seemingly en masse, that a dodgeball incident required playground resolution. I told the other kid it was stupid, tried to walk away, finally started pushing back, and ultimately ended up on the lawn in a ring of jeering classmates, flailing. “Look,” I heard someone say. “It’s the two queers fighting.” I kept on until we both stopped swinging, then went, crying, to my piano lesson. The lead bullies took no notice; as for me, I spent the remainder of my youth and young adulthood resolutely avoiding, even running from, fights.
All kinds of fights. I slunk away from arguments with parents and siblings; retreated, stung, from locker-room teasing. In junior high, I tried the bullied-child strategy of bullying someone else but I failed at the first push back; when I was randomly hit during a high school eruption of race-related strife, I simply stood, mystified at why and what to do. As an adult walking on city streets, I quickly withdrew from anything threatening, once sprinting away from a random beatdown that left both me and a friend bloodied. Fighting back seemed not unthinkable but unimaginable.
When I was 40, that gym represented an opportunity: Maybe it was time to fight. I was instructed to buy high-top sneakers, cotton hand wraps, a pair of training gloves. And, ominously, a mouth guard.
The first weeks were boot camp. About a dozen of us—all men in their mid-20s, except me—stretched, jumped rope, did gym exercises. Lee, in his mid-30s, taught us to wrap our hands. The wrapping and gloves, I learned, protect the boxer’s hands, not his opponent’s head. This was a hitting sport.
We learned to crouch and angle our shoulders, protecting still-soft bellies. Left hand up by left cheek, right around the chin, peering between gloves, we adopted the classic fighter’s pose. Lee taught us the jab: straighten that left, pop!, directly at the heavy bag. Then the cross, the overhand right—launched not from the shoulder but from the hips, pushing off that back leg and shifting your entire bodyweight. I had always heard “throw a punch,” but on those grimy wood floors facing a stained heavy bag, I understood.
“Jab!” Lee would say. Then the hooks, left and right; the jab and cross were one and two, the hooks three and four. “Give him the old one-two” suddenly had meaning. Lee explained: The one, he leans to his left; the two gets him sliding hard to his right, where your left hook meets the side of his head. We got used to pounding that heavy bag and learned the speed bag, which is about rhythm, “bappity-bappity-bappity,” and about holding arms high enough to make shoulder muscles cry out by the end of a three-minute round. That three-minute clock defines everything, followed by a buzzer and a minute of gasping rest.
It was working. My biceps strengthened, my shoulders swelled; my wife called me “Gregory Pecs.” I started to think maybe I could actually hit somebody. Then Lee said, “Bring your mouth guards Thursday,” and my stomach dropped.
We had begun moving with Lee in the ring, jabbing at his hands in paddles, learning to duck his slow-motion swipes, but sparring was different, and the gym felt different that day. Lee checked mouth guards, chose boxers of similar size, jammed competition gloves over outstretched fingers, taped laces. I had to yoga-breathe for calm.
We entered the ring and the buzzer sounded. Lee had to encourage us to approach each other, and when the first tentative jabs were thrown, terrified backpedaling followed. “Don’t turn your back!” Lee yelled, pushing us back together. But when I crouched and faced my opponent, a guy heavier but shorter and 15 years my junior, he connected. With the headgear, I felt impact, but not pain. A lifetime of running from fights and that was it? I relaxed. We moved and probed, and once I got a right hand through, I realised I had hit him. It may have been the first punch I landed since that day on the playground. It may have been the first one in my life. The buzzer sounded; suddenly, hands were removing my headgear. Soon others wore the lace-up gloves and I leaned on a bag and watched, vibrating. I had fought someone.
We sparred every few weeks. My movements grew more confident as I learned to parry and feint. I began to think I was a guy who could take care of himself. One day Lee’s dad, Roy, a small-time promoter, took me aside. He put together cards for the casinos in Biloxi. Headliners required undercards, and two-round jousts earned USD500 per palooka. Did I want to fight? I was 41 and in the best shape of my life.
“Don’t you think your life is hard enough with your brains on the inside?” my wife responded at home. Roy shrugged and life went on. Then one day, Lee approached.
“I have a bout coming,” he said, with an opponent he called a slow white guy. “I need you for sparring.” Before I knew it, I was in headgear and gloves in the ring. “To your left,” Lee would say, and I would float that way, jabbing, trying an occasional combination. He’d move forward and I’d try to duck, defend, feint, and then suddenly I was leaning against the ropes watching the light fixture swim in circles. Lee backed away as Roy and a couple others held me up. “When you see that big right hook coming,” Roy said, “you know you can duck.”
I pulled out my mouth guard. “If I could see that hook coming,” I said, “we would be having a different conversation.” I ceased to spar with Lee. I never really believed I was a guy who could take care of himself. But evidently, I can take a punch.
The next year, I lived in Nashville and took a boxing class in an office building basement. When in a newspaper office I playfully threw an air combination at other writers, one jumped, startled. “Jeez,” he said. “Do you box?”
I guess I did, a little. But I retired with a record of 0–0 lifetime. You’ll find me now on a bicycle or running underneath a fly ball. Not as good for the pecs, but fewer headaches. And no troubling echoes from childhood playgrounds, either.
Originally published on Esquire US
It’s funny how the roles reverse between child and parent as the years jostle along but that’s kind of how they are now between me and mine. Coming from a small village in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India, my mother immigrated to Great Britain in the 1970s in search of a better life. Till then, she had the back-breaking job of selling Hakka-Chinese food along Calcutta’s streets, a position she’d held since the age of six to support her family. Eventually came a golden ticket to relocate, and the SGD12 she’d saved up would kick start a new life. That, in the UK though, was spare change. Mummy would have to hustle much harder.
By the time I was born, my mum was juggling two gruelling jobs. During the day, she worked in a Chinese restaurant and come night she worked in a hospital. She’d sleep on the shop floor before it opened, and somehow still managed to meal prep for two kids before the night shift. To help, I became the model teenager any Asian immigrant could hope for: I got straight As at school, and spent all my spare time helping out at the restaurant—that’s a lot of prawn crackers packaged. We knew nothing of family recreation and I often wondered how my white friends had time to go to theme parks or the beach with their parents.
When I was at university, Mum and I experienced luxury for the first time. We had relatives in town and they booked a table at China Tang, a restaurant in Park Lane’s most famous hotel called The Dorchester. I remember that day so clearly: Mum pulled the labels off her most expensive (high street brand) clothes, we posed for photos in the lobby for what felt like forever and every bite of dim sum was savoured with a squeal. When the bill came our hearts jumped but we talked about that incredible experience for years to come and I vowed one day to take her back to that hotel myself.
My 20s were a blur. You know that time when you’re chasing promotions, are all consumed by first love and going to parties every night because your liver can perform magic tricks? I didn’t visit often while I found my way in the world as an adult. As my 30s entered I was living abroad and Mum visited me in a handful of cities. It was in Tokyo, though, that I noticed she couldn’t quite keep up. I’d walk ahead while she limped behind and climbing the stairs became a challenge. She was in her 70s, and I’d failed to really acknowledge her fragility, mostly because I was in denial. We easily label our parents old, but rarely do we see them as weak. Certainly not my busy-body single mother who can hold down multiple jobs, raise children, and eventually amass a small fortune in real estate. A health scare ensued and I realised I needed to dedicate much more quality time with my mum.
Now, I’d never before considered her to be a travel companion. We have very different tastes. I like outdoor adventure, and she prefers shopping malls; I like experimenting with local food, and she complains when the meals are not Asian, because "if there’s no rice, she’ll be hungry"; and of course, there’s the nagging, which is incessant, to say the least. Still, once a year, I plan an international adventure for us, and admittedly it’s always more fun than I anticipated. We recently journeyed to South Korea, but it’s the cruises we enjoy most because both of us can have our needs met. On a Virgin Voyage around Greece, I could have vegan while she did Korean barbecue, and we checked off multiple islands without the stress of public transit. This summer we’re sailing on a Norwegian Cruise Line to Iceland. It’s the best way for her to see the fjords and the Northern Lights from the comfort of her own balcony.
We’re dining quite fancy once a month too, and it’s about damn time. I see it as a small contribution to making up for a complete absence of indulgence in the first 70+ years of her life. This is someone who scoffed plates down between shifts, and never once took a self-care day. Now, I want her to slow down and enjoy life’s bounty—and of course, I’ll settle the bill. She can’t comprehend the marked-up price of rice in a nice restaurant, despite that being her main stipulation for dining out.
The average person in the world lives till they’re 73 years old (83 in Singapore), so it’s easy to do the math to figure out how many more Lunar celebrations or annual vacations you’ll possibly have with your parents. For most millennials, it isn’t that many at all. My mum turns 80 in 2024, and I know exactly how to mark the special occasion. We’re going to have dim sum at China Tang and she’s going to stay overnight in The Dorchester for the first time. It’s quite a splurge but I’ve been saving. Every year with her is precious and honestly, I wish I’d started doing this much earlier.
You never want to be on the back foot with a 10-year-old. But on a nightly basis between the years of 2007 and 2009, notwithstanding a certain swagger I felt I had earned on the poorly attended alternative-comedy circuit, I would succumb in secret, behind the well-buffed front doors of Notting Hill, Kensington and Mayfair, to the whims of awful children.
“If you don’t like me I’ll have you sacked.”
This from a boy of around eight, whose face of seraphic innocence, adorned by well-kept blond curls, was but a distraction from a frankly indomitable sense of self.
It was a time of provisional identities, when ambition and fantasy were close neighbours: two years after leaving university, it was still unclear whether I would be a comedian, auteur, national treasure, novelist or merely a roving thinker, a shaper of the collective perspective, a puncturer of received and tired hypocrisies. But on those evenings, for those arid and ill-prepared 45 minutes, it was certain: I was a private tutor.
It was a role I inexplicably enjoyed. I would march in leaky trainers from Lansdowne Road, following the wet map I’d drawn on the back of a Westminster 11-plus past paper, and arrive in Chelsea doing my Head Boy voice: “Where is the young man, then? Hiding from me, no doubt!”
I was of course lucky these were people to whom money was meaningless, who thought an entirely untrained tutor who clearly had his sights set on an alternative career (poet? tragedian? all doable?) might improve their child’s chances of getting into St Paul’s, Eton or Westminster. But more money had not made them more sane. One mother, for example, whose wealth appeared to stagger even her, self-funded a slew of country-music recording sessions (six albums to date). Wherever I went in her infinite Knightsbridge mansion, I was ambushed by gargantuan, self-commissioned photo portraits of her brandishing a guitar with a cowboy boot up on a hay bale, or (bafflingly) an ice-cream cone melting down her head.
Once I was helping a seven-year-old girl, whom we might call Athena, with some homework about the slave trade. I asked her how she felt about slavery and was surprised to hear, based on everything I had learnt about her personality to date, that she was passionately anti. But when I followed up for an explanation, she said straightforwardly, “I hate slaves. We have so many slaves, like you, and I hate all of them.”
Athena certainly had a lot of staff. Quite aside from the housekeeper, the gardener and the cook, when I arrived I would nod at the leaving art tutor and her brother’s departing guitar teacher, only the lifelessness of their stares betraying what awaited me: soldiers going to and from the lines.
I remember going for one memorable job: a 10-year-old had been given a chauffeur-driven car for his birthday (double figures, after all). The problem was that the chauffeur, like me, did what he was told, and was being instructed to stop at an “untold number of patisseries” en route to school. The boy was getting fat, apparently. My job—not tutoring, per se, but clearly I had a fairly low threshold for paid work at this time—was simply to sit shotgun, and be fairly firm in terms of not pulling over before the school gates. I didn’t get the job.
I should confess I liked all the tutees in the end. In fact, it was hard not to feel in some way part of this world, if only briefly, and I certainly believed—as part of the roleplay of not at that time having a personality or career; the infinite possibility inherent in being nothing—that one day I would join it. I’d eye up a three-storey town house in Kensington, for example, and adjudge the kitchen a little pokey, the sitting room overdone, and in the evening I would eat a tin of beans with a GBP2.50 bottle of wine. I drifted a few feet above reality. I felt—how ridiculous and alien and delightful it now seems—that the fruit of life was an open buffet.
It was difficult advocating for myself during this period, as you must when you return home to visit parents. They’d ask what I was doing, and would emphasise this word “doing”, as though reading and tutoring and waiting for my life to begin were not verbs. What am I doing? I am performing comedy in forgotten pubs; I am spending a week writing radio sketches for which I am paid GBP16.50 in total and I am aping Martin Amis prose in stories that make no literal sense. What do you expect me to be doing? Their alarm would be apparent in kind but lengthy silences and polite but desperate smiles, which I would feel in my chest for weeks thereafter.
Returning from one such visit, I rushed straight to a client who lived in a mews house as close to Harrods as it is possible to live. The mother had popped out and Ambrosia (say), who required help with her GCSE English and of course her respect for visiting academics, was resisting my fraying tutelage in favour of reading The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse, which she did quite brazenly before me.
I remembered a tip from an induction session at one of the agencies: if a student has poor concentration, or potential ADHD, go full Dead Poets Society: get outside for a walk, shake it up: inspire.
Minutes later I found myself feeding nuts to squirrels in Hyde Park with Ambrosia’s arm unexpectedly looped in mine and going on rides at a temporary fairground I hadn’t realised was underway there, trying to drill her on what alliteration meant but more specifically trying to persuade myself I wasn’t on a date with a pupil. She clung to me on the rollercoaster; she yelped with glee on the Wheel of Fortune ferris wheel. She had no idea what a simile was.
Meanwhile, her mother had returned home and was calling my mobile in horror, which of course I had left at home, so fortunately my mother answered. Whereupon a woman with a voice like a tuba demanded to speak to a Mr Jonny Sweet. “Because he has abducted my 16-year-old daughter.”
I lost that gig. But when I got home to my beans and wine, I happened to find The Code of the Woosters in my coat pocket and started reading. I had read a lot of Wodehouse, but this was the first time I wondered if Jeeves experiences class anger. How are we meant to feel about him, a man of great intelligence and capacity, pacing patiently after this hooting idiot, cleaning up his meaningless messes, squandering his own brilliance upon expensive vacuities in country houses built, presumably, on historical crimes?
What do we feel? We feel bliss, we feel the sun-basking heavenliness of prose and plot. Normally I did. Normally I do. And yet at this moment I choked on angry throbs.
Finally, I had lost sight of my endless horizons. My employers appeared to me as they had always really been. A door that had been quite absurdly ajar was finally shut, and in being shut, whatever finger of light had emanated from it upon my life had darkened, made reality duller, and also clearer to see. I suppose I grew up.
My first novel, The Kellerby Code, written over 10 years later, is about Edward Jevons, a homicidal Jeeves figure and, until his identity resolves at any rate, a tutor of awful children. This, at least, seemed possible.
