Email Hwee Hwee Tan at hwee_tan@hotmail,com

        After collecting 203 rejection slips (everyone lovingly recorded on my Microsoft Access database), I met T.C. Boyle and asked him what was the most important thing a writer had to have in order to succeed. "A unique voice," he said, "You need to have a unique vision that other people don't know - of a culture, a special hobby, an obsession, whatever.""Foreign Bodies" is about this individual vision, writing about something that only you know about, those mystical moments or devastating events that make you different from anyone else in the world.I've spent the last eight years living as an expatriate, drifting regularly between Singapore, Holland and England, and intermittently between ten other countries. You learn more about your country when you're in exile. You begin to realise that certain facets of your nation which you have always considered to be good, sensible, and universally accepted, is actually fascinatingly exotic or strangely repulsive to the rest of the world. In Singapore, such features would include altars in restaurants, iguanas in the garden, centipedes in the bedroom, hole-in-the-ground toilets, coffee in milk tins and of course, the death penalty. On the other hand, Britain is probably the only country which forbids the display of unclothed cleavage on T.V. before 2200, but you can pick up a newspaper with full nipple coverage at seven in the morning.