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It’s cold outside in Sweden — (But also beautiful)

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly Four minutes is all I can take. It’s not jetlag. Or culture shock. It’s just hot. I’m in a sauna. In Malmoe, in Sweden. Guidebooks and everything, they talk about this. You go to Scandinavia, and you go to the sauna. For the coziness. For warmth and safety, inside, […]

The Village Report – Six weeks in Scandinavia

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly Six weeks, all together, if I can manage to hold through December, here in Scandinavia. I think the gut knows when it’s time to shake things up, and this time, I found myself at Kastrup with an immigration officer flicking through my passport—stamps from around Southeast Asia these last […]

The Travel Report — Navigating through weather and nostalgia in Cambodia

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly The rainy season in Cambodia is definitely moody, but to the point. It’s punctual, at times, but always loud. Irreverent. It doesn’t give two smacks about how busy you are, and it always puts its own priorities ahead of yours. You would think it was a narcissist. But it’s […]

Not boxed in — Ki Chong Tran can take a punch

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly “DON’T BOX,” said Ki Chong Tran’s grandmother, worried what would happen when he moved to his mother’s native Phnom Penh. “Boxing is for peasants.” She needn’t worry. After winning a professional mixed martial arts, or MMA, fight in Phuket in August 2013 against Thailand’s Kritsada “Dream Man” Konsrichai, the […]

A tisket, a tasket — Letters and loss

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly Midday. Overcast. Reading Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung. That and looking over a few photographs of rural Ireland, plus notes I made in those days, more than a dozen years ago now, poke out of folders here on the park bench. Making headway. On the story. One I’ve […]

The Village Report — Eloping…

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly “Did you change your hair?” I said, thinking out loud. “Yeah. There’s a place called the Chop Shop in Skibbereen.” “It’s interesting how the front of your hair flips up a little bit like that.” I was used to Yoshi Kayukawa’s wilder cuts, like the shaved look in his […]

The Village Report — Vietnam: Coming to rest and search

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly “Where are you from?” he wants to know. The tour guide. It’s 7:45AM and I’m rubbing my eyes in the morning in Dalat. “Asia,” I say, mindlessly. It’s a lifelong question, this sense of fromness. Identity, the search for “who am I?” all that existential angst that only recently […]

The Village Report — Observations and sketches from Kampot

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly Three guys who talked like Eastenders asked me what I wanted. Pasta. Did they have that? Kind of. In a set. “Ok. I’ll have that. The special. But can I substitute the beer, please? Do you have milk? Yes. Yes, thanks.” I was not in the mood for beer […]

Viewing through plastic and glass in Cambodia

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By Dipika Kohli Northwest Asian Weekly Yellow sun cooks the layers of dust off the edges of the curbs. So many curbs, so few sidewalks. Bits of brick and paper and cane juice plastic cups (biked over, ripped) compete for attention. They poke up from the dirt, insist themselves into the light.