Finding the supernatural in everyday life is the foundational act of magical realism — and it begins not with imagination, but with attention. The uncanny does not descend from somewhere else. It rises from the ordinary: a door that opens the wrong way, a mirror that takes a moment too long to reflect, a grandmother's recipe that seems to remember something the cook has forgotten. Magical realism insists that the world is already strange. The writer's task is simply to look.
There are those moments when ordinary reality develops a crack — when the familiar briefly reveals an unfamiliar depth. It is not the Hollywood supernatural of monsters and jump scares. It is subtler: the sense that a place has memory, that objects carry emotional weight, that the boundary between the living and the dead is more porous than we admit in daylight.
In the tradition of magical realism — from García Márquez's Macondo to the Chinese mythological lineage of fox spirits and ghost marriages — the supernatural is woven into daily life as naturally as weather. It is not an intrusion. It belongs.
Cities are machines for producing the uncanny. Their density, speed, and anonymity create conditions in which the strange becomes normalized. A city-dweller passes a hundred strangers, enters dozens of spaces, occupies a dozen micro-climates — all within a single day. This compression of experience breeds a particular sensitivity to the odd, the off-key, the inexplicably moving.
In the cities of contemporary Asia, this urban uncanny carries additional charge. Shanghai's art deco apartment buildings, now sandwiched between glass towers, hold within their bones the ghosts of the foreign concessions. Hong Kong's MTR runs beneath a city of ancestors. Singapore's hawker centers pulse with the stored energy of three generations of immigrants who built a country one dish at a time.
Chinese cultural tradition has always maintained a sophisticated relationship with the supernatural. The lunar calendar governs auspicious dates. Door gods guard apartment entrances. These practices do not feel archaic in modern Asian cities — they feel embedded, continuous, alive.
A hedge fund manager in Pudong might consult a feng shui master before signing a lease. A dim sum restaurant in Guangzhou might keep a small altar to the Kitchen God beside the industrial steamer. These are not contradictions. They are the texture of a culture that never fully surrendered its sense of the world's enchantment to modernization.
A question for the curious would be, where do we observe the encroachment of the supernatural? Experience tells us it most often inhabits liminal moments — the time between sleep and waking, the space between one neighborhood and another, the pause between one life stage and the next.
In writing The Speculators & Other Short Stories, we tend to start with the ordinary — a real place, a real practice, a real texture of contemporary life. The supernatural emerges not as an imposed element but as a discovery: something that was always there, waiting to be noticed.
A Changsha street food stall becomes the site of a transaction that defies economic logic. A Yunnan rose cake carries within its layers a compressed century of high-altitude longing. A Singapore student's study routine, running through the weekend, creates a pressure so intense it begins to create something strange. The magical is not added to these scenes. It is extracted from them.
This is the essential faith of magical realism: that the world is already extraordinary. That beneath the asphalt and the scrolling feeds and the quarterly reports, something older and stranger continues to breathe. The writer's job is to walk slowly enough to hear it.