Wei Ting Jen
1. THE DISPATCHYou Always Ask Me How I Write
“Do you write at home?” you ask. “Or outside?”
“Alone,” I answer. “I can’t write with people around me. Especially people I know. It feels like they can hear my thoughts.”
“I’m writing at the kitchen table while my mom prepares dinner,” you say, and immediately, it feels like she’s joined our conversation, even though our chatroom, the intimate space only we inhabit, contains just our names. She’s like a shadow, the moon that eclipses us every Chuseok, who doesn’t know the smile on your face right now belongs to a woman she has never met. She knows the you I will never know, but I know the you she never can, and then I think: maybe I am the shadow.
“Do you write in the morning?” you ask. “Or night?"
“Alone,” I answer again, because no one should hear the dreams that come to me, least of all my children, least of all my daughter, who one night confides her nightmare in my ear. I called again and again, but you weren’t there. But I was, I say, trying to rewrite the ending. Didn’t you see me, coming for you with my sword? I wield her bolster in the air. Somehow, she laughs.
“I want to know you,” you say, my phone so hot I almost drop it.
You always ask me how I write. My son. He’s at my desk, spinning on the barstool, legs dangling in the air as he reads from my screen, and it shocks me, how much he wants to know me too.
2. BUREAU INVENTORYScene sketches from my works in progress
Nice things people have said about my writing
Love notes from my kids
Diary of my novel
Alexander Chee's How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Hand cream
Chewing gum
3. BIOGRAPHYJen Wei Ting’s writing has been published or is forthcoming in The Economist, Time Magazine, Catapult, Electric Literature, Room Magazine, Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, CHA: An Asian Literary Journal, and more. Born in Singapore and educated in the US and Japan, she lives and thinks in multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and is an award-winning Chinese screenwriter. Her work has been supported/and or sponsored by Singapore’s National Arts Council, South Korea’s Toji Cultural Foundation, Tin House Writer’s Workshop, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation.