this week, i submitted my first manuscript to a publisher for consideration!! holy crap!

55,000 words, 185 pages, a table of contents, chapter titles, and a visual sample of photographs i plan to include in the book – all wrapped in one tidy pdf.

until now, the book lived in a chaotic google doc, with chapters and subchapters spread across a total of 98 tabs. pulling it all together was a huge milestone.

the manuscript feels like something i can hand to the stranger who asks what i’ve been working on (…or my parents, who support me deeply but still rue the day i left my job). it’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not the final evolution of the book – but it feels complete. it’s something i feel good about. something i’m proud of.

a little recap on how we got here…

in february, after a year of writing, i finished the first draft of my book.

in march, i nervously sent it out to a group of beta readers – friends from my life, online friends i met through writing, and a few newsletter readers (now friends!) who reached out from my last post.1

slowly, the feedback trickled in – and, to my relief, the feedback was good. it was phenomenal. encouraging. the book clearly resonated deeply with people – stirring questions around identity, purpose, wanderlust, and love. readers left comments like “i kept wanting to read more,” “this resonated with so many of the existential questions i’ve grappled with in my mid-twenties,” and – in one case – “i cried twice.”

after grinding away on the book for a year, not knowing whether it would mean anything to other people, i can’t express how happy i was to find that it did.

since then, i’ve been heads down revising the draft based on the beta feedback. i deleted and rewrote entire sections, rearranged a lot of things, added a few new parts, and corrected a number of spelling/grammar mistakes…

then i turned the messy 55,000 word, 98-tabbed google doc into a 185-page manuscript, the standard format for publisher submissions (example here).

creating the manuscript felt a bit like turning in a college essay – double-spaced, numbered pages, indented paragraph starts – but with higher stakes and even less sleep. i’m pretty sure i screamed a little when i hit “submit.”

then, true to my college self, i redownloaded the already-submitted file and went over everything three more times. some things truly never change.

so who did i send it to for consideration? a publisher called autofocus – an american press that specializes in “artful autobiographical writing.” they’ve published writing in the form of memoir-in-journals, text-image works, essays, even letters – and they feel like a perfect home for my book. if you’re looking for a recommendation from their catalog, i loved Emily Costa’s Until It Feels Right!

i don’t expect much – i know that with publishing, it can feel like launching something into the void, especially as a debut author. but i’m happy to shoot my shot and see what happens. maybe, just maybe, the void will bounce something back my way 😊

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looking ahead

i’ll be honest, i felt pretty exhausted going into this month. the process of writing a book has been long, exhausting at times. actualizing that written thing into a physical book will take even longer. there’s so much that remains to be done.

but reaching this milestone has given me a lot more energy. i feel rejuvenated, excited – and all the more determined to bring my story to life.

i’ve decided to pause paid subscriptions for this leg of the book process. to everyone who has supported me with a paid subscription so far: you guys are the freaking best, and your names will be acknowledged in the book. i will also be mailing you a free signed copy of the book when it comes out.

for those interested in supporting me now or in the future: please pre-order a copy of the book when the time comes!! ☺️

lastly, if you made it this far, i wanted to say thank you all for being with me on this journey. this newsletter can sometimes feel like a mini void of its own, but it means a lot to know you’re here, reading.

lots of love,
kora ♡

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“it takes a day to walk to tokyo tower. i tried it once.

it looks beautiful from here, but as i got closer it was run-down. it was a deserted and lonely place.”

– hiromi kawakami for the new yorker

i remember the first time i saw tokyo tower, years and years ago. it was at the tail end of twilight, when the skies were fading into a violet blue and the streetlights just beginning to blink into existence. from the balcony where i stood, tokyo tower glittered bewitchingly in the twilight, its orange-and-white hues rising like an amaryllis flower against the purple skies, hovering above the nighttime cityscape that was slowly rumbling to life. 

from a distance, tokyo tower looked stunningly beautiful. 

if faraway things are always beautiful, then conversely, are they always uglier up close?

i never ended up visiting tokyo tower, so i don’t know. but lately i’ve been feeling this – this turmoil of no longer being far away. 

for the longest time, the end of my travels was a distant point on the horizon, the magical one-year mark that symbolized a kind of turning point for me. it represented the end of one phase of my life and the beginning of another, the day i would put my travels aside and dedicate my time to other endeavors. 

from a distance, this inflection point looked beautiful: i had, after a year of soul-searching, arrived at three projects i wanted to commit to post-travel. the end of my adventures would be bittersweet, yes, but i couldn’t wait to stop moving around and finally kickstart my projects. the end of my travels didn’t feel like the end of something, necessarily, but rather the birth of something new and exciting. it was my tokyo tower.

but as i buried myself in the deep and gritty work the past few weeks, i found myself slowly losing sight of that initial view of the tower. in the process of calculating costs, navigating logistics, and all the nitty gritty of setting up something up for the first time, i’ve started second-guessing myself at every turn, doubting my projects, and questioning whether i should spend my time working on them at all.

at times, i even entertained – however briefly – the thought of returning to my old profession as an engineer, something i swore i would never do. why take a gamble on these projects that probably won’t work out, i thought to myself, when you could just go back to your old job and make a safe, guaranteed amount of money?

what makes it worse, perhaps, is confronting not only my doubts, but those of my peers as well. when every other person tells me, “wait, are you sure this is a good idea? it’s going to be a lot of work” – at what point am i supposed to start listening?

ironically, i had faced these same feelings of doubt and fear a little over a year ago, when i first decided to leave my career behind to travel the world. i knew these feelings like a second skin – had lived with them, for months, on and off – and yet my familiarity did little to assuage these renewed fears. self-doubt doesn’t suffocate you immediately the way a panic attack does; it’s a slow-rising anxiety, a delayed chokehold that creeps in like an oil spill across the gulf of your mind. it circles the nape of your neck like a boa constrictor, squeezing out your confidence, self-worth, and ambitions until you finally decide to give up.

but then i read the new yorker piece, and i remembered tokyo tower.

faraway things are always beautiful, we all know this. 

but as we move closer, it’s easy to lose sight of that shimmering view that had once enraptured us. i got so bogged down in the grind of work that i forgot why i started the projects in the first place.

in these moments of disquiet, i have to remind myself of the why. kora, you are trying to create a life where you can live freely and mostly work from anywhere, i tell myself. a life where the things you pursue are deeply aligned with who you are as a person.

that’s what your projects are about. and it will take time to get there.

beautiful things take time to reach. our goals and dreams will not happen in an instant; and in the time that it takes to get there, the journey will feel anything but pretty.

when the going gets rough and doubt starts creeping in, the only thing we can do is to remind ourselves of why we are here in the first place – to remember the tokyo tower we sought, and to re-conjure that once-infinite image in our minds once more.

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thank you for reading an earlier version of this post.

p.s. i know i’m being vague about the “three projects” – i promise to share more as they develop. but i will share now that one project is to finish writing my book, which i’m prioritizing for the rest of the year. it’s coming :)

this book is a raw, unfiltered look at what it’s like to leave everything behind at 25 to find yourself.

it’s my travelogue and coming-of-age story, written in a new, untraditional format. photographs from each destination exist side-by-side with my observations and encounters, as well as reflections on purpose, identity, and the deeper meaning of life.

kora! kora! kora! 

i bolt up in bed and throw the covers off. did someone outside just call my name? 

silence; a few beats of frozen stillness at dawn. i'm about to lay back down when i hear my name again – a high-pitched woman’s voice, shouting: kora! kora! kora!

what the…? i throw a shirt on and run outside. my heart is pounding: my host family recently had a newborn, and i fear the worst. uhh... guys? i shout into the black void of the yard below. everything okay? 

my words fall like droplets on the surface of a pond, reverberating slightly then stilled into silence again. no response.

suddenly, i hear a rustling in the trees next door. squinting my eyes through the first rays of morning light, i spy a bright green shape perched on top of the branches. i scratch my head. is that… a parrot?

as if to respond, the bird spreads his wings, cocks his head and squawks: hola! hola! hola!

for the past 3 weeks, i’ve been living in a tiny beach town on the coast of el salvador.

the days are simple, simpler than anything i have ever experienced. every day is beautifully, monotonously the same: i wake up at 7am, surf, work on my book for a few hours. then i go to spanish class and surf again at sunset; after dinner i write some more. i’m exhausted by 8pm, can barely keep my eyes open at 9, and am almost always asleep by 10. now rinse and repeat for the 30-some days i’m here. 

on tuesdays and thursdays i teach a local boy english. he is 16, bleach-blonde haired, and (of course) an excellent surfer. to teach, i think, is to learn, too; this week’s chapter was on non-western literature, and we read a nigerian novel together. i’ll admit: i was a bit worried i wasn’t cool enough for him when we first started; what do high schoolers even like these days? still, i think i’ve gradually gained his respect as laidback but firm teacher – who lets him raincheck class when the surf is pumping (a reasonable excuse, by my book…) but also makes sure he turns in his assignments on time.

i live above a surf shack on the main street, two minutes walk from the beach. we call it the main street, but really it’s the only street that runs through town. it’s a bit of a sound tunnel, this street; i hear everything – and i mean everything – from my little nook above the shop. i hear, without fail, the grocery truck that comes into town every morning, jolting me out of sleep with its loudspeakers blaring: frutas! leche! huevos!; i hum along to the choral hymns from the church next door, starting with the service at 4pm on the dot every day; i dream hazily through the street dogs yapping and raising a general ruckus in the dust outside at night. 

when i first arrived, i slept with earplugs to block the noise out. how can i sleep with all this noise? i thought to myself. but i stopped wearing them after a few days. it felt almost wrong to replace the natural soundtrack of the town with a stuffed, artificial silence. instead i've learned to sleep with, and perhaps love, the symphony of life here: the sound of tiny feet tapping across the roof as squirrels run overhead; the chirp of geckos up in the rafters; the rooster that starts crowing at 3am (no, not at dawn like a normal chicken). i slumber through the joyous whoops of teenagers biking past after dinner, through the intimate laughter wafting from the pupuseria1 across the street, through even the incessant chattering of that damn parrot next door…

sometimes i’m typing away on my laptop in the afternoon with the blinds drawn when a baby’s cry floats in from my host family’s house, followed by his mother’s gentle coos. and it pierces my reverie, temporarily, to remind me that there is life outside, beyond my little studio, up and down the street in the dust and old houses and pupuserias all around me – a world of babies crying, passing conversations, couples making love, chickens screeching their heads off. and it pushes me to keep writing.

because isn’t that the responsibility of a writer, after all? to breathe stories into the mosaic of the mundane… to give life where others think there is none.

ok, ok. let’s talk about the book.

i’ve crossed 5 continents in the past 10 months in pursuit of a lifelong dream of mine: to travel the world in my 20s. 

the journey has been full of ups and downs. yes – i'm traveling the world, and it’s been so, so beautiful. the other day i saw a humpback whale breaching the waves from the patio of my spanish class. i pinch myself sometimes to remind myself how lucky i am to be here. 

but it’s also been hard – so much harder than i could have ever imagined. i have never lived amongst so much uncertainty and doubt, been so entrenched in it it’s almost become a second skin. i walked away from a life i loved, left behind a lucrative career because i wanted to explore what truly fulfills me, discover what else is possible for this life of mine. who am i if not an engineer? what is my calling? does such a thing even exist? how can i be happy?

my book chronicles this crazy, transformative journey of mine, starting with leaving hawaii 10 months ago. it’s both a travelogue and a coming-of-age story. most importantly, it’s written in real-time as my journey progresses – not by some successfully guy who eventually “made it” and looks back on his life decades later. the book is a raw, unfiltered look at what it’s like to leave everything behind to find yourself as a 25-year-old who – like everyone else – is trying to figure it out as i go along.

i’m writing in a new, untraditional format: the book comprises of 50% text and 50% photography. photographs from each destination exist side-by-side with my personal observations, travel stories, and reflections on purpose, identity, and more. it is vulnerable, introspective, and (i hope) insightful. and it will be unlike anything written before.

some of you already know this has been on my radar for quite some time; it’s the reason i started this substack in the first place. in the past month, i’ve finally started putting the book together, outlining the chapters, looking at what i’ve written already and filling in the rest of the story to weave my story through each destination. the writing process has been going well – great, even. i feel recharged and recalibrated; i wake up every day excited to keep chipping away. i haven’t felt this excited about anything in a long time.

that’s not to say it isn’t hard. because it is. how completely, obviously self-evident that i’m typing this: yes, kora, writing a book is fucking hard. nothing feels worse than days when inspiration runs as dry as an old well in the saharan desert, when i’m so so tired of reading and re-reading the same words over and over again to no avail. i feel extremely lucky to have a few writing friends ( , ) lending their time to my first drafts.2

i’ll take this opportunity, too, to finally talk about my paid subscription: for the cost of a cup of coffee every month ($5!), you can support me on my journey to get this book to bookstores, bathrooms, and backpacks all over the world.

in return, paid subscribers will receive:

• regular, behind-the-scenes updates on my book

• early chapter previews

• exclusive access to ama’s (ask-me-anything)

• acknowledgements in the book

• and, of course, my undying love for all of time.

if you’re unable to support with a paid subscription, don’t worry. i appreciate your being here all the same.

Upgrade to paid

el salvador, el salvador. we lost power the other night: my room got so hot i went to sleep on the beach. as i lay there on a towel and a makeshift sand-pillow, i felt something move against my foot. it was a hermit crab, trekking his way uphill under the half-moon. i thought back to that one sunrise on the beach in sri lanka, only a few months ago.

i came to this town because i wanted be somewhere distraction-free, somewhere far from the crowds and small enough to feel like a village. i wanted to surf every day, live a simple life by the sea, pick up a little spanish along the way. and above all, i wanted space to write, space to be alone, far from the reaches of social calls and city life, in place where i knew nobody, wasn’t beholden to anyone.

it’s a bit hermitic of me to come here, i know. walden-esque. but i think of georgia o’keeffe, who produced some of her best work in isolation at her ranch in new mexico, and george orwell, who wrote 1984 from a remote island off the coast of scotland. art needs space to thrive; just let me breathe in this salt-weathered air a little longer.

love always,
kora ♥

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thank you & for proofreading earlier versions of this post.

today i took a bus to nowhere.

the station was unusually quiet for a sunny weekend afternoon; silence hung over the october heat like a heavy fog. as i waited for my bus home, i noticed another double-decker sitting off to the side. presumably, it had arrived ahead of schedule. 

curious, i moved a little closer. “bus 28, lok wah” blinked in neon-green letters on its side. lok wah? despite spending half my life in hong kong, i had no idea where that was. never even heard of it. but i was intrigued.

scrrrt. the doors of bus 28 groaned and clanged open as passengers began to board. 

i had a decision to make. i could wait a few more minutes and take my usual bus home. or… i could go on a little adventure to lok wah. 

fuck it, i thought. i put on my headphones and hopped on.

i won’t tell you about the bus ride, about how i got off halfway because i spotted a hopeful blur of green amongst the sea of grey: the verdant canopy of a garden park peeking out between apartment buildings.

i won’t tell you about how i walked through hong kong’s little thailand neighborhood for the first time in my life. how the curving strokes of thai script greeted me in between the tapestry of chinese and english characters dotting the street. how the smells of basil fried rice seeped from the restaurants and danced into the streets. 

and i won’t tell you about how i spent 2 hours wandering inside the garden itself. meandering in no particular direction between the rows of shrubs and trees, admiring the way leaves swayed in the wind. smiling at the the kitschiness of the signs explaining the different flower types, replete with illustrations like the pages of an old children’s book. watching turtles lounging on the surface of the pond, like seniors in the pool of a florida retirement home. 

but what i will tell you is that it was beautiful, letting myself be surprised by everything i saw. to experience a part of my home city i’d never explored before. to be wide-eyed and wondering like a child once more.

when was the last time you saw something for the first time, something that stole your breath away? wonder colors your world a little brighter; it lifts your head above the clouds – and then some more. for a few precious seconds, minutes, even hours, you forget… everything. what you’ve been seeing on the news. the thesis paper that’s always lurking in the back of your mind. the world is good, you think. it’s fresh, it’s new, it surprises you at every turn. and it is beautiful.

when i think of wonder, i think of the italian alps. sunsets in bali. paragliding in colombia. why do we only expect it from big, grandiose adventures? 

but today i learned that wonder can be found anywhere – even in a city i know so well. wonder isn’t just a feeling. it doesn’t have to be something we stumble into by chance. it’s something we can create ourselves, if we choose to. wonder is a frame of mind. 

so all i can say is this: embrace your spontaneity. wander with no expectations, no destination in mind. take a bus to nowhere. 

create your own magic.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
And Eternity in an hour

– excerpt from auguries of Innocence by william blake

many, many thanks to , & for talking through + reviewing an earlier draft of this piece.

I moved to Berlin exactly one week ago.

I’m living in the Neukölln neighborhood, a large and sprawling district in the southeastern side of the city. One friend describes Neukölln as “the part of town rich people think is sketchy”. Another describes it as “somewhere you could choose to never leave if you really wanted to” – simply because everything you may possibly want can be found in this borough: parks, restaurants, bars, grocery stores and flea markets. Neukölln is big, and my little corner of it is a particularly interesting mix of dichotomies: it’s an incredibly gay neighborhood, and yet also very Muslim. Walk a few blocks south and you hit Sonnenallee, the start of a predominantly Arabic area, filled with halal restaurants and of course doner kebab shops. I think it’s lovely.

A few days ago we passed a young couple sitting outside a cafe. They were hunched over in serious conversation: the book Polysecure lay on the table in front of them, and they held what looked like their respective notes on the book in their hands.

This, my friend joked, was the quintessential picture of Berlin, boiled down into one scene. Polyamory (or at least, ethical non-monogamy) seems to be the norm here. I realized recently that a city’s bookstore mainstays can offer a good glimpse into its culture, and I have never seen more books on sex/non-monogamy than in Berlin. “There’s just so many distractions,” one friend pined. “Everyone’s young… and hot.” 

I mean, I could see where she was coming from. But I wondered – why was the non-monogamous culture so much more prevalent than, say, New York City – a similarly free-spirited city that also draws young people from all around the world? 

“It’s the culture of Berlin,” she explained. “All that free love shit – there’s no stigma against non-monogamy and being what society would call ‘slutty’”. 

“Berlin,” she added, “is the city where you can be anything you want to be.”

I can’t help but wonder if the non-monogamous culture of Berlin is human nature at its base, unrestrained form. We know from history it was only when Christianity swept across the world in the post-Roman Empire era that ideas such as marriage and monogamy became core tenets of (Western) society. The non-religiousness of Berlin, I think, has to play a major factor in all this – over 60% of Berlin residents have no religious affiliation, compared to a mere 24% in New York City. This is a drastic difference in numbers.  

So does polyamory really ‘work’? Marriage, monogamy – I’ve always been skeptical of these institutions, but I’ve never been completely sold on polygamy as an alternative either. All I can say is I’m curious to learn more.

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Why are Germans so good at ordering Chinese food?

One of the very first things I do whenever I move to a new city is to find a Cantonese restaurant I like. I can’t help it – I’m a Hong Kong boy at heart, and I need my 叉燒燒肉飯 (char siu & grilled pork over rice) to give me a little slice of home.

Anyway, I found a spot over in West Berlin and of course I was hungrily checking out what everyone else had ordered while I waited for my food.

I quickly realized that Germans actually know how to order Chinese food. These people were eating dishes that I would actually order for myself – 咕噜肉 (sweet and sour pork), Chinese spinach, even 酥炸鮮魷 (fried squid). Keep in mind that 1) the majority of the restaurant clientele were non-Asian Germans, and 2) Chinese culture isn’t very prevalent in Berlin – we don’t have a Chinatown here, and the main Asian immigrant population is Vietnamese. 

To imagine white people ordering this stuff in America is pretty unfathomable. So why do Germans have better taste in Chinese food? It wasn’t because the menus had pictures of each dish, or additional descriptions: the dish names were the classic Chinese-to-English, somewhat vague translations. If anything, the translations were pretty subpar: 乾炒牛河 was translated as rice paste with beef (paste?? what?) rather than the expected beef chow fun.

My initial conclusion, for now, is that it’s because bastardized (Americanized) Chinese food isn’t really offered here. How can you order General Tso’s chicken and kung pao chicken when it isn’t even on the menu? If Berliners want Chinese food, they have to deal with a normal, traditional Chinese menu, and they’ve figured out over time what they like and what they don’t. Adapt and survive – Chinese Darwin would have been proud.

Note: these are first impressions.