Tai Tales will now tell tales about Chinese and Malaysian culture

On writing about culture in Tai Tales and publishing science fiction in a new Substack.

A still from Till the End of the Moon, a hugely popular xianxia drama from China. I didn’t really enjoy the show but I sure loved the posters!

Hello friends,

Like the gods and immortals of Chinese xianxia dramas, this newsletter has gone through many incarnations. It started as a free way to inform readers that I’ve updated my website, where I regularly publish essays about tech, writing and finance. Then it became a way to make myself share the fiction that I’ve hidden away in my hard drive.

But over the months I’ve come to realise an unsexy fact: I really, really want to write something else.

At least, I don’t want to write fiction in the volume that a fiction Substack demands.

I’ve been writing fiction and publishing it on the Internet for a long time. Way back in the 2000s before the Kindle was even a glimmer in Bezos’ eyes. But that enthusiasm has never breached hobby levels; I had to admit to myself that not only did I not want to make fiction writing my day job, I no longer wanted to write fiction regularly. I think the spark is still there, but I want to write when inspiration hits me, not when an editorial calendar demands it.

What I really, really want to write about is my culture, which is both Chinese and Malaysian. I want to reconnect with my long-lost roots with China and have an outlet to express my frustrations about the rising anti-China, Sinophobic sentiments from the West. But I didn’t want this to be a political rag where I rant against the West and sneer at every move the United States makes. (I feel exhausted even thinking about this!)

Instead, I want to tell people that China is more than the Chinese Communist Party and that her people are varied and unique, and her culture deep and mesmerising.

I want people to look beyond the propaganda and the sneering and realise that at the end of the day, we’re all people with wonderful things to share from our culture. I want to debunk the myths people have about Chinese culture.

I also want to tell people about Malaysia because well, people are frankly confused about us. (Believe me, I’m confused as a Malaysian too.)

Tai Tales will now publish essays about my attempts to figure out my rojak identity as a Chinese and Malaysian, share fun and beautiful bits about China’s and Malaysia’s culture (which includes dramas and literature), my attempts at learning and improving my Mandarin, and commentary on events related to China and Malaysia. Very occasionally, I will share super short fiction in the wuxia and xianxia genres - these are uniquely Chinese fiction genres.

That said, I do not want to quit writing fiction completely. (Funnily or tragically, I still have stacks of unpublished science fiction.) However, I will not be publishing them in Tai Tales. Instead, they will be published in my new Substack, The Distant Stars.

I’m a great believer that people should write whatever the heck they want in their newsletter, but I feel that having science fiction tales in Tai Tales i way too different and jarring.

Having two separate newsletters enables me to control the flavour and design of each.

I am also able to use a different “pricing” model for each. For one, I don’t want to put my fiction behind a paywall but I’d like to give readers the option to support me monetarily if they wish. Think of it like busking on the Internet.

If you’ve subscribed to Tai Tales purely to read my fiction, you can now switch to The Distant Stars. And if you’re still interested in sticking around with Tai Tales despite the change, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.