Up in the air by Ken Lam

A short story about brief encounters and intimacies with strangers.

First published in Pandan Weekly in August 2025.

​From the author:

The holiday season and CNY festivities are typically a time for travel, and I picture jet lag-weary travelers having moments of connection. I wrote the story to explore how modern relationships often exist in ephemeral, contextless spaces. I almost want it to be a form of meditation on modern alienation, juxtaposing the sterile disconnection of digital life with a yearning for tactile, pre-digital authenticity. I want it to be an expression of quiet rebellion against disenchantment, to show the grace in transient spaces like airport lounges and bars, and create a tension that unfolds within such liminal and transient spaces where life pulses like a jazz improvisation: spontaneous, collaborative, and alive with possibility. Because the story is almost an ode to transience, I want its style to elevate the mundane to the mythic. Hopefully, you’ll see examples like that. The prose tries to mirror the characters’ rootlessness, and at the same time, you’ll see tactile details of analog warmth being romanticized, contrasting with modern detachment. This story avoids explicit explanations as the narration tries to invite readers to sit with ambiguity and to find meaning in gaps, pauses, and omissions.

Thank you, Isabelle, Clarisse, Steph, Rex, and Ega, for your invaluable feedback—how you highlighted the dog’s symbolic presence and questioned the tension between silence and bourbon-soaked dialogue. This short story is indebted to artists whose works shaped my journey: Tsai Ming-liang’s films (Goodbye, Dragon Inn), where loneliness lingers in half-lit rooms; Boonserm Premthada’s architectural ethos, where voids (like the dog’s missing leg in my story) speak louder than form; Youn Sun Nah’s jazz, where vocals twist conversation into raw melody; and Rabindranath Tagore’s Stray Birds, where beauty dwells in unanswered questions. I’m grateful for their work inspiring me.

Listen to the author read an excerpt of the piece:

The bar was a pocket of shadows, its light the color of over-steeped tea. A solitary bulb hung above the counter, casting a halo on the bartender’s hands as he polished glasses. The vinyl player hummed in the corner, spinning Kind of Blue for the third time that night. Each rotation released a saxophone’s sigh, notes dissolving into the tobacco-stained air. I sat myself next to it and was glad to be back again in my familiar watering hole—far from Bangkok’s livestreamers and tourists. A brindle-coated dog, one hind leg missing, limped between stools with a weary dignity. It paused beneath the traveler’s seat, sniffed at nothing in particular, and settled into a heap of matted fur. I reflexively massaged my knee; the right patella had never been quite the same since that flight over the Pacific. Five more hours to kill before departure, I thought to myself. Still better than any airport lounge.

The traveler beside me ordered bourbon, neat. His fingers tapped the rhythm of the latest Lukpeach hit, and his eyes lingered on my uniform draped across my carryall. “Why a pilot?” he asked, tapping a rhythm that now mirrored the vinyl’s crackle—Mingus Ah Um this time, side A. I took it all in and watched the dog scratch its ear with a phantom limb.

“Airplane mode,” I said, “is the closest thing we have to collective amnesia. Thirty thousand feet up, and the world becomes a poorly written first draft.” I continued, “You ever notice how silence has weight up there? Not just absence, but a presence. Like the sky is holding its breath.”

He nodded, his thumb tracing the rim of his glass, and continued shelling pistachios. Those always tasted of salt and faint melancholy, no different than hastily bought souvenirs. His thumb bore a scar shaped like a wingtip. Outside, a train clattered past, dissolving into the night; the dog sighed and began licking its paw.

“Exactly,” he agreed in between mouthfuls. “Our parents, they just pick up the phone when they need something. No preamble, no small talk. But us? We check profiles, view stories, like the post, and make small talk before we get to the point.” He made me think about how people on the internet orbit each other like shy planets, parsing asterisks and emojis.

I took another sip, rolling my bourbon on my tongue with a thought half-formed: “Down here, everything’s coded—double meanings, half-truths wrapped in ellipses. Even silence feels like it’s waiting for a response.” I set the glass down, its weight grounding me for a moment.

“But up there, in the sky? It’s different. No notifications, no distractions—just pure freedom.” I continued, “No second-guessing another’s pauses, no punctuation minefields. Up there, a period is just a period. A comma doesn’t mean you’re angry.”

He snorted, shelling another pistachio. “Sounds like heaven.”

“Or 1992,” I said. “Back when words still had spines.”

He nodded, intrigued. “In today’s world, we’re so careful with our words. Crafting the perfect text message, making sure every emoji is just right. It’s exhausting.”

The traveler flicked a pistachio shell toward the ashtray. The dog lifted its head, as if the word “exhausting” had a scent. For a moment, the vinyl’s crackle filled the silence. Then he leaned back, his thumb grazing the wingtip etched into his wrist, and began to speak.

“Did you know in Luang Prabang,” he said, “the dogs outnumber the monks? They sleep in temple shadows, bells chiming lazy warnings to no one. Just alms bowls and paw prints washed away by monsoon gutters.” The brindle dog yawned and rested its chin on its paws. “And in Bagan, before the balloons rose, a woman gave me tea steeped in tamarind and ash. Her fingers smelled of thanaka paste. She would whisper Tagore to a terracotta mutt—‘The world speaks to me in pictures, my silence answers in dreams.’”

The mention of tamarind gave me an appetite. I gestured for some gai sate for us to share, which made our canine observer prick its ears. As we both polished off the skewers and allowed the smoky char and turmeric to clear our taste buds, I thought about his stories of Luang Prabang’s monks and Bagan’s specialty beverage; they unfolded into maps I would never chart: the stubborn silt in his boot treads, the faint glow of a language app on his phone—its cursor blinking over a half-translated Lao proverb. When he recited Tagore, his voice borrowed the cadence of someone else’s longing, but his hands moved with the restlessness of a man who had worn through three passports. His fingers absently traced the spine of a battered journal, its pages bloated with ferry stubs and charcoal smudges of street dogs.

“You collect strays?” I asked, nodding at the journal. He smiled, but it faltered at the corners. “Only the ones that follow me home,” he said, flipping to a page marked by a frangipani pressed so flat it became a ghost of itself.

The incense in the bar began to curl into the morning dark, and the bartender flipped the record. Side B now: “Blue in Green,” piano keys falling like slow rain.

“There’s a flight I’ve never logged,” I confessed, the words slipping out before I could weigh them. I described a night flight over the Pacific Ocean where the horizon arched with the breath held between two bodies suspended in the dark—not touching, not apart—their heat humming a language of pulses and tide. A luminous algebra, unsolved. “Beauty,” I said, “is the moment before meaning intervenes.”

He let the words hang in the air unanswered, thumb pausing on his glass. For a heartbeat, even the vinyl’s crackle seemed to hold still. Then the dog snorted in its sleep, jolting the room back into motion. The traveler leaned forward, his scarred thumb tracing the wingtip shape absentmindedly. “What about when meaning never intervenes?” The incense smoke stalled mid-curl, thinned, and stretched toward the ceiling. “Ever chase lights that refuse to make sense?” My drinking companion pursed his lips, adjusted the bridge of his spectacles and leaned in. Of course, he asked about UFOs, everyone did at that time. I recalled such lights over Pinatubo—how their spiraling dance mirrored the stunned silence followed by unbridled panic in the cockpit. There was something seductive about the geometry of oblivion; this, of course, I did not mention to my drinking companion.

The traveler’s chuckle was thin, dissolving into the vinyl’s static. “Bullshit,” he said, but his eyes stayed fixed on the ceiling, as if tracing an invisible contrail. For a moment, the bar in Charoenkrung seemed to tilt, the incense smoke coiling into something resembling that otherworldly spiral of lights. We laughed, but the laugh settled into something heavier. The dog stood abruptly, shook itself as if dislodging a memory, and limped toward the exit, leaving only the scent of wet asphalt and lazy lethologica.

He vanished, as people do in bars that exist between layovers and destinations. They always did. Back on the aircraft, I felt the cockpit console begin to dissolve into a familiar haze of failing filament. I sent him a pyramid emoji, then thumbed my phone to airplane mode. On the runway, engines groaned into their sacred chant. As the wheels left earth, I pictured the bar below—its vinyl, its three-legged dog, its unresolved conversations—shrinking into a diorama of amber.

Altitude does something to time. The cabin lights dimmed; my watch ticked louder. Somewhere, a dog barked twice at nothing. Somewhere, a record ended. And for a suspended hour, I existed only in the parentheses between cresting waves, a comma before turning the page. The earth finally let go, and I held my breath.

Ken Lam is a Kyoto-born Singaporean and aspiring KLite. His hyphenated life is sustained not by reconciling identities, but by expanding his culinary lexicon—from caifan to kinpira to lontong.

A scientist by training, and poet historian by disposition, he writes to capture the essence of bustling hawker stalls and the serenity of temple cats.

Having lived in various cultural capitals, Ken is now based in New York, where he enjoys fly fishing with his family on the Hudson River and exploring second-hand bookstores with his partner.

Instagram: @kenairplanemode

Thank you for reading!

Pandan Weekly is a bi-annual zine and weekly email series produced by SEA Lit Circle, a community of writers and readers from Southeast Asia and the diaspora. At SEA Lit Circle, we inspire each other to write fresh, compelling work that’s true to ourselves, and we encourage each other to read and be more open to new works, stories, and perspectives within and beyond the region.

Subscribe to Pandan Weekly’s newsletter by leaving your email below.

We’d love to feature your writing. We want the works you wish someone out there would resonate with; works you write for fun, for your peace of mind, or for you to understand the world or yourself better; works you wish you had grown up with—works that beg for connections, or empathy. Check our submission guidelines through the link below.