A pair of my mother's old shoes rest in the centre of my living room, a pair of violet heels that she used to wear on stage when she sang profesionally in Japan. I placed them there when I came home drunk a few months ago, i think. I remember waking up to find them sitting in the middle of the living room, 2 odd little things that seem to have crawled out of my childhood and onto my living room floor. They sit there and they challenge me with their inexplicable presence. I don't know why I never removed them from where they stood. Perhaps it is out of pride, perhaps I am afraid that removing them would kickstart a chain of events that would ruin the routine that bleeds each of my days into the next, displacing me from where i'm comfortable, content, happy, at bliss.
At times, usually on Sundays, I would feel like a seaman bailing water with a sieve. A dissonant E rings from my untunned guitar. I gaze absently at her heels like i have done so, so many times before.

The name my parents gave me was Wang Yi. I gave myself an english name when i was in secondary school. I didn't change my name deliberately, the name just rolled out of my mouth on the first day of school.
"hello everybody, my name is Daniel Peh"  as if i've always been a Daniel Peh, as if since the day I was born, Mr and Mrs Peh decided that their second son has the face of a Daniel Peh, as if I was always destined to be a Daniel Peh. I don't know where I pulled that name out of, actually, it more or less jumped out of my throat on its own accord. So it was from that moment that i became Daniel Peh, and a very good liar.
My earliest memory involves a yellow butterfly. I must have been in kindergarden or perhaps nursery school when I caught one for the first time. My seond earliest memory invlolves ants, a line of ants, and how I licked them off the balcony window in twos and threes. If you ask me, ants taste kind of like dust, and kind of like spit. My third earliest memory involves a girl. A pretty girl, a Eurasian girl with a china doll haircut and black hair framing a set of strikingly blue eyes that gave you the impression that she was nothing short of magical. We were four I think and she kissed me on the cheek during a church service ( a requirement of the school at that time ). I told myself that she was going to be my wife one day. I cannot remember her name, which is only natural because I cannot remember the names of any of friends from the nursery or the kindergarden. When i think back on them on days like this, they resemble ghosts more than children. A vague impression of a pink pinafore , of me dressed as a lion in a school play and dust from the yellow butterfly that i caught in my lunchbox, wings soaked in sardine sauce. With its belly upturned, i could see the fur of its segmented body sway gently in the breeze of a sunny Wednesday morning, me in my pink checked uniform, squinting at the butterfly dust that covered my hand, yellow like jaundice and sunflowers.