Member-only story
About Me — Alvin T.
Permanent outsider, over-thinker, INTP, coffee addict, beer lover
Thank you so much for reading the whimsical garbage that comes out of my head. I doubt anyone is really interested in the person behind the computer, stringing words together to fling into the vast unknown.
But, if you’re ever just a little bit curious, here’s a little bit about my background, and why I write what I write.
My Childhood
I was born in the Southeast Asian city-state of Singapore in the mid-1980s. Ethnically, although Chinese, growing up in a postcolonial country meant that I was schooled in English, even though my grandparents spoke Hokkien, a Southern Chinese dialect (or language, depending on your point of view).
In the 1980s, envisioning the rise of China, then Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew instituted a “Speak Mandarin” campaign. In practical terms, that meant that I was also educated in Mandarin Chinese, which I would like to believe gave me a later advantage in studying Japanese. Unfortunately, although I was fluent in Hokkien in my childhood, I have since forgotten most of it.
Still, I never got very good at Chinese. Instead, I displayed an aptitude and perhaps preference for the English language very early on in life. I grew up reading books written…
