Most days I breathe and write. I also read, teach, love the people I love, worry about climate change, fret over the future. Other times I dream. On good days my dreams grow into real projects. Re-Imagining Our City started on a good day.

This is a dream for young people to have a big say in shaping their city. How will we do this? We start by involving them in the design and building of a new public green space for Pittsburgh's Hill District, former jazz mecca now stigmatized by negative media reports. We form a diverse council of teen leaders recruited from wealthy and less wealthy neighborhoods. They collaborate in hosting fun, joyful public conversations for their peers, for younger children and for the adults in their communities. Together, we gather many different voices for a vision of the city we all want. We find ways to connect neighborhoods to the rivers so that as the city develops its waterfront for tourists, there will also be green spaces that are stunningly beautiful, inspiring and accessible to all.

It's a way to protect all of us from what the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls the "deep malaise in our society." In Thich Nhat Hanh's words, "When we put a young person in this society without trying to protect him, he receives violence, hatred, fear, and insecurity every day, and eventually he gets sick....We human beings need something to believe in, something that is good, beautiful and true, something that we can touch."

See more project photos at www.facebook.com/pages/Re-Imagining Our City/8081964359.

My Published Work:

My novels, The Scent of the Gods (W.W. Norton, 1991) and Shadow Theatre (Soho, 2002), are both set in Singapore, where I grew up.

My shorter work can be found in Charlie Chan is Dead: An Anthology of Asian American Literature, edited by Jessica Hagedorn (Viking, 1993), and Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Cheng-Lok Chua (New Rivers, 2000).