What I do
I’m an independent writer-photographer.
I tell stories because it gets me out into the world. There’s nothing I find so rewarding as to roam outside my own experience, talk to strangers, and write about it. (Except, perhaps, when I’m actually writing; I’m equally happy at rest and on the move, in turns.)
I have been a journalist—both on staff and as a freelancer—for more than a decade. In my stories, I have ranged across varied themes: humans & nature, migration & culture, memory politics & the legacies of conflict.
I like to try, wherever possible, to combine intimate storytelling with immersive reporting, and my work—in the form of narrative nonfiction, news features, and essays coupled with photographs—have been published in print and online, in both news and literary media.
I was a columnist for the Virginia Quarterly Review, telling reported nonfiction stories with braided Instagram posts, and I have contributed essays and reviews to the Mekong Review.
I’ve also been published in Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN, Public Radio International, Vice Asia, South China Morning Post, Foreign Policy, Wired UK, Slate, The Straits Times, New Naratif, Esquire Malaysia, Malaysiakini, The Malaysian Insider, and Between The Lines, among others.
Some of these stories have been supported by the Pulitzer Center, the National Geographic Society/Out of Eden Walk, and the Fuller Project.
I’m also a freelance editor. Back at the very beginning of my writing journey (so long ago!), I was Digital Editor at Litro, a literary magazine for emerging writers in London. Before I started freelancing full-time in 2015, I was Associate Editor at Esquire Malaysia. More recently, I have helped edit publications like The Mekong Review and CamboJA News, and I currently edit guest essays for my newsletter, Movable Worlds.
In 2021, I was a Solutions Journalism Network mentor. I have also helped individual writers find their way with their own projects.
What’s next?
I often begin by seeking out stories with a vivid sense of place, to better make sense of our changing world and our personal and collective place in it. At heart, this is what animates my curiosity, the pursuit of which I sometimes document in my newsletter Movable Worlds.
These days, I am working on a couple of personal projects I’ve been imagining for a while, led by my desire to explore different storytelling forms. I’ll be sharing more on this in my newsletter.
However, I am still taking occasional writing and editing commissions where I can, so please feel free to get in touch.
Further notes
I previously freelanced as a researcher and fact-checker and may continue occasionally to take on such assignments. Clients have included Raw TV in London and Rack Focus Films in Kuala Lumpur, with documentaries broadcast on channels such as National Geographic Asia and History Asia.
I studied Law and graduated with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. My thesis explored the informal practice of sharia law in the United Kingdom and the extent to which it is or should be recognized in English family law.
I enjoy learning new languages, and being multilingual has helped my reporting in different places. English is my first language. I’m conversational in Malay, Spanish, and Mandarin. I’m currently at B1-level German.
I currently divide my time between Kuala Lumpur and Berlin. I have usually worked in and around Malaysia but have also explored other countries in writing. I hope to tell stories from wherever I go in hopes of better understanding the interconnections of our world.
“As Freya Stark famously said, ‘It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which in Art as in Life, is so depressing.’ The same could be said of talented, passionate and committed journalists—specifically longform literary nonfiction writers; especially in Asia.
Emily, counter to all this, is the presence of the good. I had the great pleasure to work with her and be her editor, her support so she could pen articles of consequence and value in the magazines I helmed: Esquire Malaysia and Esquire Singapore. Emily crafted well-thought, balanced and insightful pieces on issues of the day that other media rarely addressed. Her on-the-ground environmental piece that tackled the endangered pygmy elephants of Borneo underscored the plight of all human-animal conflicts; her piece on the Rohingya refugee crisis of 2015 saw her travelling and interviewing dozens of informants to reveal its true horror; and her story about the death penalty in Malaysia was prescient on the global debate about capital punishment. Emily inspired me and made a true difference to the readers who read her analysis and beautiful prose.”
Sam Coleman
Former Editor, Esquire Malaysia/Singapore
When I’m not out reporting stories or inside reading and writing, I’m exploring parts of whatever city I’m in that is yet unfamiliar to me, following food, culture, and history trails in particular. In between, I’m reading and scribbling in cafes and bookshops and on park benches, or taking refuge in the darkened recess of some cinema, tavern-like bar, or swing dance hall.
When I’m looking for adventure, I leave whatever’s familiar and go on a journey—road trips, multi-day hiking or horseback riding, and long, very long bus/train/boat rides. The jungle and the desert, though difficult, beckon particularly to me. And always, I search for a story to tell.
You could say that being in a state of motion started early for me. As a toddler I was already in possession of a passport, though it was a restricted one and allowed entry to only one country: Singapore. I was weaned on countless looping interstate family road trips around Malaysia, plotting points on the map through Kuala Lumpur, Perak, and Johor, and across the causeway to that little red dot, where half my relatives live.
Later, I studied Law in England, and being abroad for that extended period emboldened me to see more of the world for myself, unmediated by friends and family. After graduating, I went backpacking on my own through Central America, and it was there that I realised I could be alone in an unfamiliar place without feeling lonely, speak Spanish without butchering it, and salsa without inflicting serious bodily harm. It’s hard to overstate how those months changed the idea of travel for me. It was the first experience of my life to draw out the contradictions I was living, and continue to live, uncomfortably with, but it was also life-affirming and helped me to begin understanding the lives that existed outside myself and my general milieu. Travel was no longer about escapism, if it ever was, but a closer communion with the world, which, for me, always goes hand-in-hand with writing.
These days, because of work commitments and emotional ties that bind, you’ll usually find me in Kuala Lumpur; sometimes in Berlin, where my partner lives; and occasionally in London, where I used to study and work and where many of my friends have stayed. However, I still look for every opportunity to set up camp elsewhere for a season. Years back, looking for a possible way back to Latin America, I landed in Lima and stayed for six months. I had planned to stay longer, but it didn’t quite work out that way. I haven’t been back to the region since, but I carry it with me still, and the memories I collected there sometimes still slip, unbidden, into the backdrop of my present life.
Still, even as other countries and cities often better express my inner desires, Malaysia remains my emotional anchor, even when I resist it, when I want to get away. You know that line from Gone Baby Gone? Something about how it’s the things you don’t choose that make you who you are? I’ve come to realise that, for me, my restlessness was never about finding somewhere better to be. I love many places, and grow nostalgic for them whenever I am away, wherever I am. For better or worse, I have the wanderer’s eternal affliction of here versus there.
And before I ever crossed physical distances, I wandered even further between the pages of books: The Call of the Wild, Moby Dick, The Secret Garden, Great Expectations, The Hound of the Baskervilles… and those Mandarin audio tapes of Chinese fairytales my mum bought me to get me to learn the language. Did any child who ever had such vicarious adventures not grow up longing to be out in the world?