Mind the Gap

Mind the Gap follows Nora, a data-loving Malay girl finding her way through Singapore’s ever-expanding MRT lines and its increasingly narrow social expectations from the 1990s to the 2020s. With her sharp observations and a suspicious number of pie charts, she examines meritocracy, race and the boundaries of ambition, and learns to navigate the rules around her and to carve out a space of her own. The author, Ratna Damayanti Taha, is a Singaporean writer with a background in academic communications research and translation. She writes with a focus on ordinary people and everyday relationships, paying attention to the quiet details that shape daily life. Her story “Dayung Sudah di Tangan, Perahu Sudah di Air” won the Golden Point Award for Malay short story in 2021, and her short story “Resipi Warisan” was published in a Malay short-story anthology by Unggun Creative, a Malay-language publisher in Singapore.