About myself
My pen name is Kali Kong. I used to be an epidemiologist, but I wanted the freedom to write about anything out of the ordinary. And it really means anything from ghosts to demons to a pseudo historical fantasy world where flying pigs exist. After a long career of fact-checking research proposals and technical reports, my cooped up creativity wanted to explode.
My former bosses advised me not to quit my day job in public health. But I did. The dead (and undead) are more interesting than the living.
Why? Before I became an epidemiologist, my profession was nursing. I used to do night-shifts in an Australian hospital because of my further studies. From personal experience, a lot of weird things happened during the night — and science still couldn’t explain it.
Even before nursing, my childhood was spent in a Bruneian apartment where things would smash at night in the storeroom when no one was inside. And then living in a Singaporean apartment during my teenage years… you can google ‘Jurong West’ and ‘ghost story’ together — I bet you’ll find some very interesting stories about a few blocks. One of which involved the block I used to stay in.
There’re many more personal paranormal experiences, but that might take a book to explain. As the Chinese say, “科学的尽头是玄学”, when we reach the limits of science, abstract theories form without logic (metaphysics, including the paranormal). Science can’t explain everything. Hence, my interest.
A little tidbit about symbolism on my website:
The snake is an ancient totem of my ancestor’s province, Fujian, China.
The talisman (link to My Works) is a Taoist amulet.
The red spider lily, 彼岸花 (higanbana in Japanese/ bǐ'ànhuā in Mandarin), is believed to line the paths of the dead in the Japanese and Chinese Buddhist afterlife.
The fox, 狐 (kitsune in Japanese/hú in Mandarin) is my favorite supernatural trickster. It hold the statuses of a fairy, a deity and a demon in Chinese folklore. It is also a divine messenger of a Japanese Kami (稲荷お大神様 Inari Okami- sama), a deity whom I follow.
