Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty stories tall, rise out of the ground like trees.

— Justin Ker

Shaw Centre has restaurants on the fourth floor, where the ACS boy can pull chairs out for her. Girls love this because no one else does it for them, especially not those so tong RI boys.

— Justin Ker

The rain is a screen that changes the color of the sky, causing a sepia filter to fall over the city. It is as if the city has gone back in time, to the age before the invention of full-colored photographs. Light becomes suffused and quiet.

— Justin Ker