The Ordinary and the Strange
All the stories in this book were first published in the fanzine Oi Hui-kau — Fiction Passion, roughly one per month starting from June 19, 2024. During the same period I was also writing SF Girl’s Diary, a record of daily life with my sisters — over four hundred thousand characters, now published as a separate volume. Both are about everyday life, just in different ways: one is realistic, the other imaginative. To me, though, they’re two sides of the same coin.
Everyone’s life is split between dreaming and waking. Most people focus on the waking part — what we call reality. But we also spend a lot of time in sleep, or in daydreams. That part isn’t fake; it’s just a different kind of experience, a different kind of reality. Or maybe the two aren’t as separate as we think: what we believe is waking might actually be a dream, and what we dismiss as a dream might actually be waking life. Zhuangzi said all this long before me, so I won’t repeat it.
Dreaming within waking, waking within dreaming — that’s just how consciousness works. We only call it strange because we don’t notice it. I’ve never personally lived through any of the scenes in these stories — if I had, I’d probably have lost my mind by now. But when I’m writing, these strange images come up naturally, feeling vivid and familiar, as if I really had been through them. Is the ability to experience the abnormal as though it were everyday life a necessary quality for a writer? I don’t know. I only know that the act of writing is both strange and ordinary at the same time. You need a stable outer life to protect your wild inner imagination; but you also need a solid inner foundation to handle the senseless strangeness that comes from outside.
Thank you to Ting-yam and Heng-sun for constantly encouraging me to write, and for creating this fanzine and giving me space to do whatever I wanted in it. I honestly don’t think I can become a writer — but becoming someone for whom writing is just part of daily life. That I still believe I can do. And thank you to everyone who enjoys reading my words. Finding connection through writing is one of the most wonderful things in the world. Wishing you all well!
Lai Sun-fei
October 6, 2025
About the Author
Lai Sun-fei is a literature lover and newbie mom. She is co-founder of the fanzine Oi Hui-kau — Fiction Passion, author of the serial novel SF Girl’s Diary, and writes the columns “SF’s Perfect Ordinary” and “SF’s Strange Ordinary”. Her nickname is Fiction Creator; she is also a collaborator on EverMemento. She is committed to swimming, running, or walking her Shiba Inu every morning, and spending her days reading and writing, living out her own simple perfect ordinary.
SF’s Strange Ordinary was originally published in Chinese in ebook format in 2025. Following it’s serialization in English translation, an English ebook version will be published. If you want to buy the Chinese version (USD 7.99), please click the link below:
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